Hoaving said that, an article in the New Yorker, called, MASTER PLANNED, Why intelligent design isn't", that is meant to play down intelligent design, actually, IMHO, describes some of the science behind it. Here's one example:
Michael J. Behe, a professor of biological sciences at Lehigh University (and a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute), is a biochemist who writes technical papers on the structure of DNA. He is the most prominent of the small circle of scientists working on intelligent design, and his arguments are by far the best known. His book Darwins Black Box (1996) was a surprise best-seller and was named by National Review as one of the hundred best nonfiction books of the twentieth century.Darwins' Black BOx makes a lot more of this particular avenue and is good reading of you are really interested in what a fairly prominent bio-chemist thinks in this regard.
Not surprisingly, Behes doubts about Darwinism begin with biochemistry. Fifty years ago, he says, any biologist could tell stories like the one about the eyes evolution. But such stories, Behe notes, invariably began with cells, whose own evolutionary origins were essentially left unexplained. This was harmless enough as long as cells werent qualitatively more complex than the larger, more visible aspects of the eye. Yet when biochemists began to dissect the inner workings of the cell, what they found floored them. A cell is packed full of exceedingly complex structureshundreds of microscopic machines, each performing a specific job. The Give me a cell and Ill give you an eye story told by Darwinists, he says, began to seem suspect: starting with a cell was starting ninety per cent of the way to the finish line.
Behes main claim is that cells are complex not just in degree but in kind. Cells contain structures that are irreducibly complex. This means that if you remove any single part from such a structure, the structure no longer functions. Behe offers a simple, nonbiological example of an irreducibly complex object: the mousetrap. A mousetrap has several partsplatform, spring, catch, hammer, and hold-down barand all of them have to be in place for the trap to work. If you remove the spring from a mousetrap, it isnt slightly worse at killing mice; it doesnt kill them at all. So, too, with the bacterial flagellum, Behe argues. This flagellum is a tiny propeller attached to the back of some bacteria. Spinning at more than twenty thousand r.p.m.s, it motors the bacterium through its aquatic world. The flagellum comprises roughly thirty different proteins, all precisely arranged, and if any one of them is removed the flagellum stops spinning.
In Darwins Black Box, Behe maintained that irreducible complexity presents Darwinism with unbridgeable chasms. How, after all, could a gradual process of incremental improvement build something like a flagellum, which needs all its parts in order to work? Scientists, he argued, must face up to the fact that many biochemical systems cannot be built by natural selection working on mutations. In the end, Behe concluded that irreducibly complex cells arise the same way as irreducibly complex mousetrapssomeone designs them. As he put it in a recent Times Op-Ed piece: If it looks, walks, and quacks like a duck, then, absent compelling evidence to the contrary, we have warrant to conclude its a duck. Design should not be overlooked simply because its so obvious. In Darwins Black Box, Behe speculated that the designer might have assembled the first cell, essentially solving the problem of irreducible complexity, after which evolution might well have proceeded by more or less conventional means.
MOre comes from a prominent mathmatician and philosopher who is also well published. His books, The Design Inference", and, "No Freee Lunch" also provide good examples of the science driving this particular theory. From the same article in the New Yorker, these comments are made about this branch of study:
The other leading theorist of the new creationism, William A. Dembski, holds a Ph.D. in mathematics, another in philosophy, and a master of divinity in theology. He has been a research professor in the conceptual foundations of science at Baylor University, and was recently appointed to the new Center for Science and Theology at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. (He is a longtime senior fellow at the Discovery Institute as well.) Dembski publishes at a staggering pace. His booksincluding The Design Inference, Intelligent Design, No Free Lunch, and The Design Revolutionare generally well written and packed with provocative ideas.So...adding the other researcheres and scientists who line up on the intelligent design side of the equation...there is scince behind it. It is just a matter of whether you are inclined to believe that science or not and try and push its envelope furuther...or to try and punch holes in it...which, according to our limited science exist. Just like they do in the evolution theories.
According to Dembski, a complex object must be the result of intelligence if it was the product neither of chance nor of necessity. The novel Moby Dick, for example, didnt arise by chance (Melville didnt scribble random letters), and it wasnt the necessary consequence of a physical law (unlike, say, the fall of an apple). It was, instead, the result of Melvilles intelligence. Dembski argues that there is a reliable way to recognize such products of intelligence in the natural world. We can conclude that an object was intelligently designed, he says, if it shows specified complexitycomplexity that matches an independently given pattern. The sequence of letters jkxvcjudoplvm is certainly complex: if you randomly type thirteen letters, you are very unlikely to arrive at this particular sequence. But it isnt specified: it doesnt match any independently given sequence of letters. If, on the other hand, I ask you for the first sentence of Moby Dick and you type the letters callmeishmael, you have produced something that is both complex and specified. The sequence you typed is unlikely to arise by chance alone, and it matches an independent target sequence (the one written by Melville). Dembski argues that specified complexity, when expressed mathematically, provides an unmistakable signature of intelligence. Things like callmeishmael, he points out, just dont arise in the real world without acts of intelligence. If organisms show specified complexity, therefore, we can conclude that they are the handiwork of an intelligent agent.
For Dembski, its telling that the sophisticated machines we find in organisms match up in astonishingly precise ways with recognizable human technologies. The eye, for example, has a familiar, cameralike design, with recognizable partsa pinhole opening for light, a lens, and a surface on which to project an imageall arranged just as a human engineer would arrange them. And the flagellum has a motor design, one that features recognizable O-rings, a rotor, and a drive shaft. Specified complexity, he says, is there for all to see.
Dembskis second major claim is that certain mathematical results cast doubt on Darwinism at the most basic conceptual level. In 2002, he focussed on so-called No Free Lunch, or N.F.L., theorems, which were derived in the late nineties by the physicists David H. Wolpert and William G. Macready. These theorems relate to the efficiency of different search algorithms. Consider a search for high ground on some unfamiliar, hilly terrain. Youre on foot and its a moonless night; youve got two hours to reach the highest place you can. How to proceed? One sensible search algorithm might say, Walk uphill in the steepest possible direction; if no direction uphill is available, take a couple of steps to the left and try again. This algorithm insures that youre generally moving upward. Another search algorithma so-called blind search algorithmmight say, Walk in a random direction. This would sometimes take you uphill but sometimes down. Roughly, the N.F.L. theorems prove the surprising fact that, averaged over all possible terrains, no search algorithm is better than any other. In some landscapes, moving uphill gets you to higher ground in the allotted time, while in other landscapes moving randomly does, but on average neither outperforms the other.
Now, Darwinism can be thought of as a search algorithm. Given a problemadapting to a new disease, for instancea population uses the Darwinian algorithm of random mutation plus natural selection to search for a solution (in this case, disease resistance). But, according to Dembski, the N.F.L. theorems prove that this Darwinian algorithm is no better than any other when confronting all possible problems. It follows that, over all, Darwinism is no better than blind search, a process of utterly random change unaided by any guiding force like natural selection. Since we dont expect blind change to build elaborate machines showing an exquisite coördination of parts, we have no right to expect Darwinism to do so, either. Attempts to sidestep this problem by, say, carefully constraining the class of challenges faced by organisms inevitably involve sneaking in the very kind of order that were trying to explainsomething Dembski calls the displacement problem. In the end, he argues, the N.F.L. theorems and the displacement problem mean that theres only one plausible source for the design we find in organisms: intelligence. Although Dembski is somewhat noncommittal, he seems to favor a design theory in which an intelligent agent programmed design into early life, or even into the early universe. This design then unfolded through the long course of evolutionary time, as microbes slowly morphed into man.