ID and Darwinism are not at loggerheads, except in the overheated imaginations of strict creationist, as is the case with Odin-buried-the-giants-after-the-battle-of-the-horefrost-bridge theory of origins, and the natural panspermia theory. You can have an infinite number of theories to explain life's origins and major turnings, and when the evidence is only gaps in our understanding of the mundane naturalistic answer, all are equally valid, and equally entitled to claim a place at the scientific table. Doesn't that sound scientifically useful? Maybe we can conduct science like they did at the Nicene Council, and science-priests can have bloody pitched battles over questions framed like whether Jesus is of the essence or the substance of God.
SETI is not at that point yet. If SETI finds signals within the target frequency band, then it would be time to inquire as to whether those signals are natural or artificial, and that could very well involve the same types of questions that are currently engendered by the crevo debate.
SETI = "Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence". This search is clearly not driven or funded or cared about, because it might produce a modulated narrow band carrier, with the implications of that discovery left entirely as an abstract exercise for later. That is clearly not remotely the case. Like the Michaelson-Morley experiment, it is a search targeted on validating an hypothesis which is, in fact, at loggerheads with the alternative hypothesis. And if I may say so, it seems rather silly to argue against the title of the scientific endeavor.
Obviously SETI researchers are "motivated" by the hope of finding an exterrestrial signal from another civilization. but motive is irrelevant in research. To search for something, you have to define what you are searching for, and SETI is looking for a narrow band signal. Oddly enough, in science, not finding what you are looking for is useful information, even when it is personally disappointing.
In the case of ID, there is no definition at all of the signal being searched for.
They can't both be right. Either species were developed through foresighted intelligence, or they weren't. That's the controversy that's at issue.
This search is clearly not driven or funded or cared about, because it might produce a modulated narrow band carrier, with the implications of that discovery left entirely as an abstract exercise for later.
Regardless of the motivations for doing this, that exact scenario is what's likely to be in store shoud a signal within this band be detected. You can't just will science to be something that it's not. You have to search for data, then you have to interpret the data. When it comes to origin-of-species questions, we already have lots of data. We're mostly at the second stage with that.