This is the first in a five-part series comparing the theory of evolution with the theory of intelligent design. In honor of Charles Darwin’s 200th birthday, EverythingIsHistory.com has invited writer Tomo Albanese to share his experience of discussing the origins of man with a lawyer from the Discovery Institute, a proponent of the theory of intelligent design.

Photo courtesy of alexanderdrachmann on Flickr

The battle of ideas is an often unforgiving one, and it claims the most victims when it is waged outside the walls of academia and inside the impressionable and unsuspecting minds of the lay public. Also, as noted by Shermer and others, intelligent people are often experts at rationalizing ideas which are fundamentally flawed. Such is the case with Evolution and Intelligent design, two opposing ideas bent on explaining the origin of man, and both bringing up far more questions than there are answers. In the end, the average “Joe” is left to wonder – which idea is right?

To answer this you have to know what Intelligent Design is, and what claims it makes. Thanks in large part to a conversation with Casey Luskin, I have had the privilege of getting an insider’s look at what proponents of ID believe, and I’m going to break down most of it this week. I know, ID seems like an odd way to kick-off “Darwin Week”, but when the dust settles and Darwinian ideas are still standing, it will seem only fair that I let ID throw the first punch.

To understand ID, you have to understand what claims are being made, and what claims are NOT being made. ID does not talk about god, aliens, or abiogenises; the origins of life much like with evolution are not covered. What ID DOES cover however is whether or not life has been designed, or did it come from blind-chance.

“The theory of intelligent design holds that certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, not an undirected process such as natural selection.” – Discovery Institute

Like all scientific theories, ID makes predictions which are testable, and these predictions are the foundation of the theory.

Predictions of Intelligent Design

1. High information content machine-like irreducibly complex structures will be found.
2. Forms will be found in the fossil record that appear suddenly and without any precursors.
3. Genes and functional parts will be re-used in different unrelated organisms.
4. The genetic code will NOT contain much discarded genetic baggage code or functionless “junk DNA”.

So far so good, this is the bread and butter of Intelligent Design – manage to falsify even one of these claims and you’ve falsified ID. To contrast, let’s take a look at the theory of evolution.

Photo courtesy of Barabeke on Flickr

Now for our purposes, we are talking about the biological evolution of species, not microevolution, change over time, etc. That change within a species occurs over time isn’t really up for debate, the main debate regarding evolution is how it relates to the advent of new species. The most succinct explanation was given by Douglas Futuyama, “Biological evolution … is change in the properties of populations of organisms that transcend the lifetime of a single individual.“

However there is so much to say about evolution, including predictions that can be made off of the theory, that it is hard to nail-down just a few. Here’s a list borrowed off of Talk origins of just a few of the predictions that can be made.

Predictions of Biological Evolution

1. Diseases will become resistant to any new widely used antibiotics.
2. Darwin predicted, based on homologies with African apes, that human ancestors arose in Africa. That prediction has been supported by fossil and genetic evidence (Ingman et al. 2000).
3. Theory predicted that organisms in heterogeneous and rapidly changing environments should have higher mutation rates. This has been found in the case of bacteria infecting the lungs of chronic cystic fibrosis patients (Oliver et al. 2000).
4. Predator-prey dynamics are altered in predictable ways by evolution of the prey (Yoshida et al. 2003).
5. Ernst Mayr predicted in 1954 that speciation should be accompanied with faster genetic evolution. A phylogenetic analysis has supported this prediction (Webster et al. 2003).
6. Several authors predicted characteristics of the ancestor of craniates. On the basis of a detailed study, they found the fossil Haikouella “fit these predictions closely” (Mallatt and Chen 2003).
7. Evolution predicts that different sets of character data should still give the same phylogenetic trees. This has been confirmed informally myriad times and quantitatively, with different protein sequences, by Penny et al. (1982).
8. Insect wings evolved from gills, with an intermediate stage of skimming on the water surface. Since the primitive surface-skimming condition is widespread among stoneflies, J. H. Marden predicted that stoneflies would likely retain other primitive traits, too. This prediction led to the discovery in stoneflies of functional hemocyanin, used for oxygen transport in other arthropods but never before found in insects (Hagner-Holler et al. 2004; Marden 2005).

Now giving ID the benefit of the doubt (Evolution has been around almost 150 years without being falsified), the predictions made by ID could be true. However, to better understand these predictions we must understand the 2 core principles of Intelligent Design: Irreducible Complexity and Specified complexity. I’ll get into those tomorrow, see you then.