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Not useful. In fact, not scientific.

William Dembski tackles this question in his new book, No Free Lunch

The crucial question for science is whether design helps us understand the world, and especially the biological world, better than we do now when we systematically eschew teleological notions from our scientific theorizing. Thus, a scientist may view design and its appeal to a designer as simply a fruitful device for understanding the world, not attaching any significance to questions such as whether a theory of design is in some ultimate sense true or whether the designer actually exists. Philosophers of science would call this a constructive empiricist approach to design. Scientists in the business of manufacturing theoretical entities like quarks, strings, and cold dark matter could therefore view the designer as just one more theoretical entity to be added to the list. I follow here Ludwig Wittgenstein, who wrote, "What a Copernicus or a Darwin really achieved was not the discovery of a true theory but of a fertile new point of view." If design cannot be made into a fertile new point of view that inspires exciting new areas of scientific investigation, then it deserves to wither and die. Yet before that happens, it deserves a fair chance to succeed.
One of my main motivations in writing this book is to free science from arbitrary constraints that, in my view, stifle inquiry, undermine education, turn scientists into a secular priesthood, and in the end prevent intelligent design from receiving a fair hearing. The subtitle of Richard Dawkins's The Blind Watchmaker reads Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe without Design. Dawkins may be right that design is absent from the universe. But science needs to address not only the evidence that reveals the universe to be without design but also the evidence that reveals the universe to be with design. Evidence is a two-edged sword: claims capable of being refuted by evidence are also capable of being supported by evidence. Even if design ends up being rejected as an unfruitful explanatory tool for science, such a negative outcome for design needs to result from the evidence for and against design being fairly considered. Darwin himself would have agreed: "A fair result can be obtained only by fully stating and balancing the facts and arguments on both sides of each question." Consequently, any rejection of design must not result from imposing arbitrary constraints on science that rule out design prior to any consideration of evidence.
Two main constraints have historically been used to keep design outside the natural sciences: methodological naturalism and dysteleology. According to methodological naturalism, in explaining any natural phenomenon, the natural sciences are properly permitted to invoke only natural causes to the exclusion of intelligent causes. On the other hand, dysteleology refers to inferior design-typically design that is either evil or incompetent. Dysteleology rules out design from the natural sciences on account of the inferior design that nature is said to exhibit. In this book, I will address methodological naturalism. Methodological naturalism is a regulative principle that purports to keep science on the straight and narrow by limiting science to natural causes. I intend to show that it does nothing of the sort but instead constitutes a straitjacket that actively impedes the progress of science.
On the other hand, I will not have anything to say about dysteleology. Dysteleology might present a problem if all design in nature were wicked or incompetent and continually flouted our moral and aesthetic yardsticks. But that is not the case. To be sure, there are microbes that seem designed to do a number on the mammalian nervous system and biological structures that look cobbled together by a long trial-and-error evolutionary process. But there are also biological examples of nano-engineering that surpass anything human engineers have concocted or entertain hopes of concocting. Dysteleology is primarily a theological problem. To exclude design from biology simply because not all examples of biological design live up to our expectations of what a designer should or should not have done is an evasion. The problem of design in biology is real and pervasive, and needs to be addressed head on and not sidestepped because our presuppositions about design happen to rule out imperfect design. Nature is a mixed bag. It is not William Paley's happy world of everything in delicate harmony and balance. It is not the widely caricatured Darwinian world of nature red in tooth and claw. Nature contains evil design, jerry-built design, and exquisite design. Science needs to come to terms with design as such and not dismiss it in the name of dysteleology.
A possible terminological confusion over the phrase "intelligent design" needs to be cleared up. The confusion centers on what the adjective "intelligent" is doing in the phrase "intelligent design." "Intelligent" can mean nothing more than being the result of an intelligent agent, even one who acts stupidly. On the other hand, it can mean that an intelligent agent acted with consummate skill and mastery. Critics of intelligent design often understand the "intelligent" in intelligent design in the latter sense and thus presume that intelligent design must entail optimal design. The intelligent design community, on the other hand, understands the "intelligent" in intelligent design simply to refer to intelligent agency (irrespective of skill, mastery, or cleverness) and thus separates intelligent design from optimality of design. But why then place the adjective intelligent in front of the noun design? Does not design already include the idea of intelligent agency, so that juxtaposing the two becomes redundant? Redundancy is avoided because intelligent design needs also to be distinguished from apparent design. Because design in biology so often connotes apparent design, putting intelligent in front of design ensures that the design we are talking about is not merely apparent but also actual. Whether that intelligence acts cleverly or stupidly, wisely or unwisely, optimally or suboptimally are separate questions.
Who will want to read No Free Lunch? The audience includes anyone interested in seriously exploring the scope and validity of Darwinism as well as in learning how the emerging theory of intelligent design promises to supersede it. Napoleon III remarked that one never destroys a thing until one has replaced it. Similarly, Thomas Kuhn, in the language of paradigms and paradigm shifts, claimed that for a paradigm to shift, there has to be a new paradigm in place ready to be shifted into. Throughout my work, I have not been content merely to critique existing theory but have instead striven to provide a positive more-encompassing framework within which to reconceptualize phenomena inadequately explained by existing theory. Much of No Free Lunch will be accessible to an educated lay audience. Many of the ideas have been presented in published articles and public lectures. I have seen how the ideas in this book have played themselves out under fire. The chapters are therefore tailored to questions people are actually asking. The virtue of this book is filling in the details. And the devil is in the details.

One example of how evolution has hindered the progression of natural science is in the example of the human appendix, which was believed to have been a purposeless organ or an evolutionary glitch.

And who can calculate how the study of human embryology was hindered by Haeckel's hoax?

I think the reductionist tendency of evolutionary theory/materialist philosophy will do a lot of damage in the field of artificial intelligence.