Dear List'izens,
"Intelligent design" means different things to different people. It is often promoted for theological reasons.

There is, however, science behind it. The SETI (search for extraterrestrial intelligence) project depends on it. SETI will identify a signal as being from an intelligent source if the probability of its being generated by chance alone is very low. Watch the movie Contact for an example.

The probability that a sequence of 10000 nucleotides came together by chance alone is 4 to the minus 10,000th. Now, 4 ^ 5 = 1024 > 10 ^ 3, so 4 ^ -10000 is < 10 ^ -6000. That number, 0.0000…0001 with 6000 zeros between the decimal and the 1, is a very small number. And 10,000 nucleotides is a tiny fraction of the 3,000,000,000 in our genome.

Yes, the universe has been around a long time, but 15,000,000,000 years is only about 4.7 * 10^26 nanoseconds, too little time for such improbable events to occur. OK, maybe we're off by a factor of, say, 1000, and our universe has actually been around for 15 trillion years. And say that our universe is only one of a googol universes. Then there have been about 4.7 * 10^129 nanoseconds. A very big number, but still way too small to account for something that would happen by chance alone only once in 10 ^ 6000th times.

Intelligent design, at least in the version presented in the popular press, is pseudoscience. But its scientific challenges to Darwinian theory are quite real. Simple random mutations in DNA just can't account for what we see. There must be other mechanisms at work. The question is a fascinating one, whether one is an atheist ("How did this happen?") or a theist ("How did God do this?").

Thanks,
Dan
VinsonD@...