Well, there are indications in the article that point very much to intelligent design:
The small RNAs were guiding the silencing reaction. If their sequences were programmed to match a gene, it would shut it off almost completely.
You did notice the word 'programmed' there did you not? Have you ever heard of a program, regardless of the length that was written at random? Note also that they have to match the gene which is to be silenced. Note also that " the extra copy of the pigment gene he'd added was somehow cueing the plants to shut off their purple color" so we have the gene checking and knowing that something was amiss and issuing double-stranded RNA to the specific gene to stop its protein production. Note also that double stranded RNA is not normal, so we have a special function to do this which needs a special code to do it.
It is even more complicated than that however. We must remember that the genome is just a long series of DNA. This DNA only has four possible meanings and when read in threes as in genes it only has some 64 possible meanings. So how does this DNA know in the case of genes it is to produce single-stranded RNA and in the case of these silencers to make double stranded RNA? The answer is pretty obvious: that the DNA in the genome is primarily a program of which the genes are really the exception, they are the data used by the program. The rest are instructions telling the organism what to do. It is the only possible explanation for the genome 'knowing' that something is amiss, where it is amiss, what RNA is to be produced and where it needs to be produced.
And yes I do deny that any kind of long string of information even a few hundred bases long can arise at random just as I deny that a bunch of monkeys can write even a short sonnett or a short piece of programming code.
BTW, Gore, your firm opposition to the notion that species are capable of the slightest independent genetic change would suggest that you are a fixed species man. Most young earth, strict creationists allow for rather considerable genetic change, arguing, for instance, that the entire Equid family may well represent a single "created kind," even though all species of horses, asses, and zebras have different chrosome numbers, and therefore reorganizations in their DNA well beyond what you would countenance.
Creation science types generally take profound offense if they are stereotyped as holding to fixed species. Are you the embodiment of the elusive stereotype?