'The Theory of Intelligent Design' is not a theory since it posits no verifiable hypotheses; it is rather a partisan attack upon natural history by embittered religious creationists who have exhausted all judicial appeals to teach biblical inerrancy to our most vulnerable subjects in public schools and whose logic is based solely upon argument from personal incredulity. Unlike the 'hard sciences' such as physics and chemistry which seek universal principles through exhaustively cross-checked experimental interrogations of nature, natural history is more like forensics: the investigation of events which cannot be repeated, and is therefore more vulnerable to criticism from both within and without that truly demanding and venerable discipline. I shall deal here with the very origin of life, which will hopefully illuminate not only the moment of 'creation' but also the evolution of unique species during the aeons to follow. Below the fold.....Onward!
Old time creationists thumped their inerrant bibles, mounted Noah's ark expeditions and employed the Pat Robertson 'I refuse to believe' thinking method. But now, neo-creationists (intelligent fabricators) have figured-out that bible thumping reached only the chior and front pews so they turned down the volume on Adam & Eve and longsuffering witness Noah but remained stubbornly devoted to the primacy of belief over evidence. However, when you start with "Shazaam! You're an aardvark!" there's not much you can say about aardvark ancestry except to attack anybody else's idea, particularly if that idea has a whole lot of evidence and is therefore a threat to your faith. They began to memorize (faith protecting them from understanding) verses from the flood of popular natural history books that began in the 60s (that dreaded decade). That was the trick! They'd use scientific terminology against science (like they do their morality from the bible, they would cherrypick only those aspects of science and technology that serve their purposes, like cellphones, satellite broadcasting, pentuple bypass surgery, updated flu vaccines, etc.). They learned to speak and write in the lingo of science (Note: those who have ever accomplished something in any discipline know that one can obtain an advanced degree without ever understanding the distinction between shit and Shinola).
One of their most hopeful attacks was thermodynamic: 'Since physicists agree that entropy (disorder) relentlessly increases, it is impossible that life could have become organized by natural processes'. What neo-cretins left out were the words 'in a closed system'. The Earth is not, but Earth + Sun is indeed a closed thermodynamic system ( to an excellent approximation) and the Sun's huge energy loss (an entropy increase) amply offsets life's organization and its continued propulsion and indeed ultimately propelled the organization, albeit stupid, of neo-creationism. Nevertheless, thermodynamics reached the middle pews and they were on their way!
The patriarch of intelligent design Michael Behe harps on what he calls 'irreducible complexity'; e.g., the first organism or any a new trait cannot be naturally selected unless it is already functional, something to be selected upon. After all, of what use is half a wing if it cannot yet fly. The simple answer is that it was earlier a gliding wing and before that a completely different function like webbed forepaws or a solar collector for a cold-blooded ancestor, or both. And as for the very first living organism, Behe's strawman is a bacterium. 'If one threw all the molecular parts into the air, no matter how many times, they could never settle to form a living bacterium'. Well, a bacterium is not the simplest actual or conceivable organism. A virus is far-far simpler. Granted, a virus must propagate inside a larger host so it couldn't have been the first; more like a spin-off parasite; but it propagates, it mutates, it is selected, it evolves, it lives. Even we humans have environmental constraints.
No, the simplest conceivable living entity is a short scrap of nucleic acid (DNA or RNA) in an environment that includes the necessary molecular parts and a catalyst to enable replication. Molecular biologists now routinely propagate RNA, serially selecting and re-propagating until they have evolved a desired trait. It propagates, it mutates, it is selected, it evolves, it lives.
And now, Discovery Institute's Steven G. Meyer has written the slam-dunk against any natural origin of information, specifically the information contained in the DNA of a first organism or the DNA that differentiates one species from another. After all, information precedes function and thereby derives its meaning. Therefore function cannot precede its causative information. Sounds reasonable but it's just the old 'I refuse to believe' gambit, which is really Mr. Meyer's willful (dare I say 'obtuse') lack of imagination, which I shall now proceed to supplement; but first a one paragraph lesson (which you can skip if you already know basically how DNA carries information and replicates).
Nucleic acid (DNA/RNA) is a durable unbranched polymer (a string of molecular beads) having just four kinds of beads arranged in any order of any length. Thus, the order of the beads can (and does) represent four-character information just as do the two and twenty-six character alphabets of computers and English, except that the four character 'words' can be serially 'read' by the molecular machinery that they (the bead sequences) have directed to be synthesized. Hmm...Messrs Behe & Meyer demand to know how a blueprint for machine tools can be executed without starter machine tools already in place. Well, the details are still deeply buried in history and unfortunately had no bony parts to be fossilized but I can give them some clues; not that they would ever read this stuff unless armed with crosses, mirrors and garlic necklaces. Ahem...The amazing property of nucleic acid is that bead A can fit lock-and-key against bead B in an adjacent string, and C against D. Consequently, string ABCD..... attracts and binds to its complimentary string BADC..... forming the familiar double helix, a redundant information archive. And the beauty of this is that string ABCD.... or whatever, can also attract and bind single beads B, C, D, A, .... which can then be joined together by an appropriate catalyst, thereby creating a new string that is the exact compliment (like a photographic negative) of the original ABCD.... template string. When the new complimentary BADC... string is replicated by the same process, the result is an exact copy of the original ABCD....! Now throw in the occasional copying error (noting that a perfect copying process cannot exist without perfect editing) and you have the basis for the natural selection of the most effectively surviving and replicating strings and therefore evolution. In extant life, all of the cells, organs and tissues with which nucleic acid surrounds itself through chemical instruction are nothing more than survival and reproduction mechanisms elaborated and branched over 3.8 billion years.
Now, after the Earth has cooled sufficiently, start with a short scrap of randomly formed nucleic acid, some beads (nucleotides), and a suitable catalyst to join-up template aligned beads. At first you'll get compliments and copies, then variants (mutations), then variants upon those. Each variant bends or folds into some shape or other that is characteristic of its bead sequence due to the mutually equilibrated attractions and repulsions among its variously ordered beads. Consequently, some will be more readily recognized (lock & key) by the catalyst and will be replicated more frequently than others - natural selection. Being recognized by the catalyst and recognizing the catalyst are perfectly reciprocal, so the appropriately shaped nucleic acid has a trait, a function that is instructed by the sequence of its beads. This my friends is our pearl - the origin of evolution, of life, of information. Further mutation improves upon this trait and as so often, maybe always, happens in evolution, a developing trait has many incidental side-effects, some of which can be useful to its causative nucleic acid. Selection adds this new trait to its criteria for survival. Webbed paws for paddling or swamp-walking incidentally collect solar heat, and made larger for that purpose encounter aerodynamic use and so on. Cook for several billion years of accumulation and branching and you may get Messrs Behe & Meyers.... but not likely. Evolution is contingent. A butterfly flaps its wing in Asia and you get Hurricane Katrina and the Bush dynasty falls (not really but you get the point). If you started things all over again you're not likely to get homo sapiens nor even ardvaarks.
Now, we have winnowed the nucleic acid that is most readily replicated; what next? Well, a nucleic acid that recognizes the catalyst (lock & key) is potentially a template that can splice two smaller molecules together to form a replica of the catalyst. And now you have a catalyst making (yin & yang) nucleic acid compliments and you have nucleic acid making catalyst. I'd call that a runaway cycle; wouldn't you? Although this mode of synthesizing catalyst is rather rudimentary, I'm sure that natural selection can handle the task should any opportunities arise.
Now, as for the origin of new species, (e.g., new populations that are so modified as to preclude interbreeding with other near-descendents of their parent stock), unabated environmental stresses, or maybe especially, persistent microbial pandemic can radically narrow the previous selection criteria, decimating populations and allowing otherwise freakish mutations to survive in lieu of the previous well-acclimated and well-mixed ideal. Population decimation isolates small groups from the previous gene pool - behind mountain ranges, on islands, in oases, at different ocean and lake depths. These small populations can then rebuild based upon the small, freakish gene pool at their disposal. When they have slowly rebuilt their population (mere thousands of years; a blink of the geologic eye; which is why there are 'missing links' in the geologic record) and begin to mutually encroach upon their distant cousins, they find that they can no longer 'do-it' with each other, at least successfully, and you have two species for one. On the other hand you do have your asexual clones that are not affected by population isolation because they were genetically isolated previously but, being locally identical, they are pruned by the branch rather than individually.
Unlike Behe & Meyers who are dogmatically certain of their doctrine, which can cover everything yet explain nothing, we do not know if life began as described above nor the path taken prior to the accumulation of a fossil record. For one thing, we do not know what the initial replication catalyst might have been. Literally millions of powerful catalysts range from simple metal ions, like those used in industrial processes, to biologically evolved enzymes that have highly specific chemical effects and are unlikely to have been present at the origin of life. As surmised by the cosmological anthropists, perhaps the universe must be as large as it is for there to have been a significant probability somewhere of the conditions necessary for the chain of natural events necessary for life to ignite, and that place happened to be Planet Earth. How can we be sure? Although the holy grail of NASA funding is now actually E.T., (keep this quiet) we have a statistical sample of precisely one.