I remember reading Darwin's Black Box by Michael Behe way back in high school. When I read it, I read it with an open mind—I was attending a private religious school, where we were taught nothing of natural selection (in fact, most of what I had learned about evolution was through PBS). So upon finishing the book, I accepted a lot of Behe's arguments... for about three days. Upon considering things for myself, the profound weakness of Behe's logic became apparent even to me: a high schooler with a poor background in biology...

For those who haven't read it, I'll summarize it poorly in one sentence: there are many systems in biology that are so complex, that removing one component leads to total failure; ergo such a system could not possibly have evolved in a random, piecemeal fashion. This is an appeal to "irreducible complexity" (IC), and it is the fundamental premise of Behe's book.

The IC argument is the standard one tossed about by those interested in promoting intelligent design. If you accept that a system could not have evolved piecemeal, then the only rational explanation is that the system was built from a plan. Of course no scientist of any real merit accepts this thesis, because it is flatly not empirical, not predictive, not falsifiable, and therefore not under the purview of the natural sciences.

While the intelligent design community has revved up the PR engine and receives a lot of press, the scientific community has remained busy trying to actually understand life. As you can imagine, the recent ascent of intelligent design is a huge sclerotic headache to biologists concerned about education and culture. So imagine my pleasure when I stumbled across this blog post by Jim Hu, faculty of the Biochemistry & Biophysics department at Texas A&M University. He deftly summarizes in one table the reasons scientists fear (and don't fear) intelligent design. This is exactly the sort of thing that academics need to read and discuss in order to arrive at a common viewpoint on intelligent design.

It will hurt us tremendously if we turn our collective back on scientific education by leaving the discussion of science to the talking heads on Fox and CNN.