The above is a great point by Dembski, but it really does not go far enough. The reason modern science has totally disproved Darwinian evolution is DNA. Dna is very complex and a single mutation is not even the beginning of a new functionality. It will hardly have any selective value at all. Add to that that any system or organ in the body requires not just a new protein but numerous proteins, numerous genes, lots of controlling and regulating DNA and one can see that until one has it all together, there will be no function at all. So rather than giving selective advantage, it will provide a selective disadvantage until it is complete. Evolutionists could get away with a new function just happening 150 years ago, but they cannot get away with it anymore.
As you know, ID does not dispute evolution.
Some may say that, however, I would say it disproves it completely. If you need the Creator to come and design new features, functions, and to organize them into a coherent whole, then evolution as a theory of the origin of new distinctive functions and abilities is totally false.
Dembski appears to be reluctant to go that far. As he says, ID refuses to speculate about the ontology of design. As he puts it, "For intelligent design the crucial question...is not whether organisms emerged through an evolutionary process or suddenly from scratch, but whether a designing intelligence made a discernable difference regardless how organisms emerged." He writes,
"Intelligent design does not require organisms to emerge suddenly or be specially created from scratch by the intervention of a designing intelligence. To be sure, intelligent design is compatible with the creationist idea of organisms being suddenly created from scratch. But it is also perfectly compatible with the evolutionist idea of new organisms arising from old by a process of generation. What separates intelligent design from naturalistic evolution is not whether organisms evolved or the extent to which they evolved but what was responsible for their evolution."
In the latter case, intelligent design could be thought of as a fully specified "program" (or maybe even an encryted universal code) loaded up-front and all-at-once into the beginning event of the Universe -- that is, at the Big Bang. The program running in time directs the evolution of the Universe and all things in it, ordering apparent randomness into designed forms as contemplated (so to speak) by the program designer.
I think it's important to note, however, that this is not necessarily a deterministic system. I speculate that higher-order (i.e., more complex) organisms have greater freedom/ability to read and process program information than lower-order organisms. DNA specification is presumably what makes the big difference here. But the route to higher complexity -- seemingly an evolutionary path -- may come via the ability to successfully process information. Information processing and natural selection seem to work together dynamically.
All this would seem to imply a teleology -- programs are designed to effect purpose(s). Encrypted messages are designed to be read. Of course, this teleology business gives certain hard-core Darwinists -- like Richard Dawkins -- fits. They insist on a completely purposeless, and thus effectively meaningless, universe. It's all just a random walk to nowhere, or they won't be happy.
As Joshua Smart has pointed out, "ID is in some sense an evolutionary theory. It is a theory about when evolution is inadequate." Generally speaking, it is inadequate when it fails to take into consideration the component of intelligence in all of life -- built into life up-front (at least as potentiality that can manifest in living forms as the program "runs"), and demonstrated in intelligent action by living beings. The information designed into the "cosmic program" is key to the evolution of the system. The "Darwinist mechanism," as Dembski calls it -- that is, natural selection -- is an after-effect of some sort of successful "information processing" event (so to speak) occurring in a living organism.
As to speculating about the designer -- the Creator -- you know as well as I do that this is not a scientific problem, strictly speaking. We have to get outside of science to deal with that issue: Science can deal with the design, for it is observable in nature. The designer, however, is completely out of reach of science, and this is necessarily so. For the "cosmic program" would have had to have been "designed" before space and time began, if it came into effect at the Big Bang -- before which there was no space and no time. This, I imagine, is the reason for the hostility of some biologists and physicists to the idea of ID.
But this doesn't bother me at all. There are limits to what science can do. Some questions are simply beyond its reach. The greatest mistake a thinker can make, IMO, is to believe otherwise.
So much for my little speculations, gore. You know of course that certainty in regard to such questions is completely out of our reach. Thank you for sharing your thoughts with me. I'd enjoy hearing any comments you may have WRT to the above.
This is false, and is directly contradicted by posts 349 and 356.
Some references
Predicting the emergence of antibiotic resistance by directed evolution and structural analysis. Orencia, M. Cecilia; Yoon, Jun S.; Ness, Jon E.; Stemmer, Willem P. C.; Stevens, Raymond C. Department of Molecular Biology, The Scripps Research Institute, La Jolla, CA, USA. Nature Structural Biology (2001), 8(3), 238-242.
Evolution of an antibiotic resistance enzyme constrained by stability and activity trade-offs. Wang, Xiaojun; Minasov, George; Shoichet, Brian K. Department of Molecular Pharmacology and Biological Chemistry, Northwestern University School of Medicine, Chicago, IL, USA. Journal of Molecular Biology (2002), 320(1), 85-95.