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ID is no different to any sciences except for the fact that it claims that things are designed, not random accidents. For example, if you study a computer and you learn that the computer has a designer, does that mean that science no longer works when researching a computer? One ameba cell equals 1000 sets of an encyclopedia. So if you spelled out the information in English and printed it in books, it would fill out 1000 sets. If the simplest forms of life have so much complex information, it can be argued that it is the result of an intelligent mind. Would you ever believe me if I told you that my encyclopedia set created itself or would you insist that there was a designer?
If I spelled out that information in English (translation difficulties aside) and printed it in books, then yes, that would presumably be ID, but only because books themselves are intelligently designed. And where did you get the idea that the lowly amoeba is the simplest form of life? Some amoeba genomes are considerably larger than the human genome.
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A living cell is much more complicated and ingenious than any manmade machine. In a pinhead of DNA, the information stored would take 15 million million books to contain the information. There would be enough information to go from here to the moon 500 times.
Are these (x number of books in English, or x number of lunar round trips) supposed to be measures of information content?
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SETI, which looks for intelligent life in space are looking for signs of intelligence.
This is precisely not what SETI is looking for; what they are actually looking for is narrow-band electromagnetic transmissions, which might (or might not) be an indication of artificiality. Unlike IDists, SETIists do not claim (so far) to have discovered any such transmissions outside of human-generated signals.
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How exactly would they determine intelligence? If they got a reply with the numbers 1-100 neatly written out, do you think it would infer intelligence?
If SETIists ever found such a signal embedded in an extraterrestial transmission, I'm confident that knowlegeable IDists will get the first crack at determining its information content and would be capable of answering that question themselves. Oh, wait, the IDists would need to develop a usably-quantifiable measure for information content first (along with a minimum threshold value of such that would indicate "intelligence"), which they have been repeatedly asked for to no avail. No rush, though.
DWIII
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