I have no real brief for, or beef with, Intelligent Design (ID) theory - the idea that life in the universe is too complex to have arisen through the processes of evolution (mutation + natural selection + time) and required a designer. I don't believe it's science, because it's metaphysics, but neither is atheistic materialism science, and that's often taught as part of evolution courses. On one level the whole "should ID be taught in science class?" debate seems wrong-headed to me. The division of the whole complexity of life into a bunch of school subjects makes no sense anyway, it's just a convenience, so the conversation we should really be having is about integrating the curriculum and abolishing these arbitrary divisions... but maybe that's another rant for another day.

There are two arguments that are being used against Intelligent Design, though, that are logically flawed and weaken the case, and I thought I'd spend a few minutes on each of them. The first is the oft-heard statement "Well, if Intelligent Design is real science, its proponents should be publishing real scientific papers in real, peer-reviewed scientific journals". On the surface it's plausible enough: the checks and balances that ensure scientific progress and detect scientific fraud revolve around the peer review system[1].

But, pure and objective and unsullied by politics as we might like to think the peer review system is, what it actually consists of is people like you and me[2] sitting around in offices reviewing papers. And that process, as Thomas Kuhn has explained, occurs within certain sets of shared beliefs and assumptions ('paradigms') that tend to make it difficult for scientists to see alternative perspectives. Simpler than that, though, is that academic publishing is a business: if publishing ID articles brings your journal into disrepute and costs you sales - as it's very likely to with a fiercely opposed evolutionary biology community - why would you do it? So the barriers to publication for ID articles are extremely high, and it's disingenuous to use the lack of publications as evidence of a lack of merit in these theories.

The second issue that's often used as an argument is 'so, given an intelligent designer, how do you explain childhood leukemia, or the anopheles mosquito, or the fact that our vulnerable testes are in a very kickable spot, or... [whatever other random bad thing]'. It's also an understandable misunderstanding, but it makes the logical error of assuming that intelligent design is the same thing as benign design. That's at least partly because implicit in most of the Intelligent Design discussion but very carefully not made explicit is the idea that God (usually a pretty specific Western Christian God) is the Designer. Since God is seen as benevolent, it seems to follow that the design should be helpful, nice, good for us. But there's no requirement in Intelligent Design theory that God be the designer - it could be an advanced race of aliens, or 'person or persons unknown'. Based on all the evidence around us, intelligent design (if it exists at all and isn't just a misreading of evolution) has been applied toward the purpose of survival. A shark, for example, is an awesomely well-designed predator. Tough on its food, and tough on us if we venture into its world, but still an awesome example of design. To take the three cases I mentioned above:

• Childhood leukemia is a form of cancer - of cells replicating in ways that are harmful to the human. It's bad and it's horrible and you wouldn't wish it on your worst enemy. But it's an example of a flaw in an astonishing design, not an example of design as such. If you look at the DNA-RNA replication sequences, there are unbelievable safeguards built in to prevent and correct errors. They don't always work 100%, but if they weren't there, without being too harsh about it, we'd all be lumps of undifferentiated cancerous cells every time we went out in the sun. The design is stunningly good - it's just not perfect.
  
• The anopheles mosquito (they're the ones that carry malaria) example is partly just an example of anthropocentrism: putting humans at the centre. Sure, it sucks that millions of us die from malaria (which, incidentally, is a parasite spread by the mosquito, not something inherent to the mosquito itself), but that's thinking about it from our perspective. Intelligent Design, and biology more generally, has to think of it from the perspective of the anopheles mosquito and the malaria parasite, and both of those are doing pretty nicely, thanks very much. In fact, the mosquitos are even adapting to our penchant for spraying them with insecticides by becoming resistant...
  
• I could suggest that putting our testes out there in the breeze like that was God's way of evening up the odds: make us bigger and stronger, but uniquely vulnerable... I could also suggest that it evens up the odds in another way - women look great naked, we just inspire laughter. But in fact it turns out that, in order to produce healthy viable sperm, it's necessary for testes to be a few degrees cooler than core body temperature. They're out there swaying in the breeze because they need some air conditioning to work properly (and tight underwear that pulls them in close to the body again has been shown to lower sperm counts and motility (swimming ability)). So although it might look like a suspect design decision, it actually makes perfect sense.

As I said at the beginning - I have no brief for ID. For me it's an undecidable question - interesting for dorm room bull sessions but not able to be decided in any final way. But if we're going to discuss theories, we need to at least use high quality arguments.

1. I'm currently reading Neal Stephenson's wonderful 'Quicksilver', about the Royal Society and the very beginnings of this kind of system of scientific inquiry - it's highly recommended.
2. exactly like me: I'm writing this post while procrastinating before peer reviewing a paper!