Sean Carroll replied to an essay written by Paul Nelson concerning George Ellis' recent essay . And if responses continue , these descriptions will look like Rube Goldberg machines 
James Pinkerton wrote an essay about Intelligent Design. Let's take a look.
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I put this under "Nature of Science" because there is no "Philosophy of Science" area. The philosophy of science - or confusion thereof, is my subject.
Having this past week once again read a book, The Chess Garden by Brooks Hansen, I am once again struck by the philosophical divide between "Empiricism" and "Rationalism." As this divide pertains to the current debates between the rationalism of Darwinism/neo-darwinism and the empiricism reflected in most versions of Intelligent Design.
A pretty good exposition on the dichotomy is offered in Rationalism vs. Empiricism from Stanford, though in this essay and in Wiki's separate offerings on both philosophies, there is an element missing from current descriptions that was present back when the two philsophical stances first vied for supremacy in the philosophy of science during the nineteenth century.
Several years ago, I commented on how James Shapiro's views of evolution are actually quite friendly to ID. Appreciation of this point requires the recognition of a subtle point.
I noted:
Essentially, natural selection is kicked off its throne. It no longer acts as the busy-body overseer who monitors each step of the design, but instead simply gets called upon for final approval when the intra-cellular designers are finished.
Yet how does this work? Shapiro argues that the genome of various organisms possess a "system architecture." Essentially, the various genes in the genome are organized in such a fashion that their expression is tied to such organization. And what plays the crucial role in this organization is the repetitive DNA (commonly called "junk DNA").
A recent study lends support to Shapiro's views of evolution.
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A common complaint about ID is that is has no research program. But what would constitute such a research program? I can think of at least two areas that could qualify, design detection and design dynamics. While ID theorists like Michael Behe, William Dembski, and others have spoken to the issue of design detection, I would like to focus on the area of design dynamics.
There's an op-ed in the Toronto Star by Salman Rushdie (yes, that Salman Rushdie), titled "Just give me that old-time atheism!" In it, Rushdie criticizes Dylan Evans, professor of robotics at the University of West England, who has proposed a "new, modern atheism":
"Evans has written an article for the Guardian of London deriding the old-fashioned, '19th-century' atheism of such prominent thinkers as Richard Dawkins and Jonathan Miller, instead proposing a new, modern atheism which 'values religion, treats science as simply a means to an end and finds the meaning of life in art.'
Indeed, he says, religion itself is to be understood as 'a kind of art, which only a child could mistake for reality and which only a child would reject for being false.'"
In their letter to Nature, Coyne et al. write:
The real business of science teachers is to teach science, not to help students shore up worldviews that crumble when they learn science.
Okay, so what might be a "scientifically approved" worldview? Perhaps we should look to one of the signers of the letter "“ James Watson, the Nobel Laureate who helped decipher the double helix model of DNA.
Robert McHenry is Former Editor in Chief of the Encyclopædia Britannica and the author of How to Know. He recently wrote an anti-ID essay entitled, We Are Living in a Material World…
He begins his essay as follows:
Intelligent Design "theory" — and I insist upon the shudder quotes — is not a theory at all, but a declaration of faith poorly disguised behind a mask of scientific-sounding justification. It has been hoisted into public consciousness and political debate on the shakiest of legs.
While I agree there is no ID theory (I pointed this out years ago), McHenry's characterization of ID has the intellectual depth of a cliché. But there is one thing worth commenting on, as McHenry lets his cat out of the bag.
A while ago, I commented on Ed Brayton's misgivings about ID. Brayton noted that among ID investigators, there were different attitudes towards "the theory that all modern life forms are derived from one or a few common ancestors via descent with modification" - I, for example, accept it, whereas Paul Nelson from ID the Future rejects it. So, Brayton inquired, what does ID say about common descent? My answer, as I gave him at that time, was that ID itself didn't take a stand on common descent, just like evolutionary theory itself didn't take a stand on the discussions of tradition gradualism vs. punctualism, adaptationism vs. structuralism, etc.
Earlier today, I cracked open a new book, The Spark of Life: Darwin and the Primeval Soup by Christopher Willis and Jeffrey Bada, and was reminded of my answer by a passage in the introduction. After mentioning physicist Freeman Dyson's suggestion that the first organisms were nothing but bags of metabolic pathways, Willis and Bada write:
"Dyson's idea illustrates vividly the severe fragmentation of viewpoints among scientists who deal with the origin of life. Dyson and other scientists, such as Gunter Wächtershäuser of Munich, David Deamer of the University of California at Santa Cruz, and Doron Lancet of the Weiszmann Institute in Israel, are firm believers that metabolism must have come first. Another and much larger group of scientists, including Stanley Miller of the University of California at San Diego, Thomas Cech of the University of Colorado, and Leslie Orgel of the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, believe just as firmly that gene replication came first.
This second group is hardly monolithic. There are endless arguments among them - for example, what was the nature of the first genetic material? Was it ribonucleic acid (RNA)? Did some other simpler genetic material precede RNA? Is it possible to construct simple molecules capable of carrying genetic information in the laboratory"
Willis and Bada believe that their book will provide the answer that'll unite the field, but their describtion of the current situation is instructive. Like the statement "Some features of life are intelligently designed" is compatible with multiple scenarios, so is the statement "Life is the result of purely unintelligent processes". Each statement act as a common denominator for a varied group of people, holding to different scenarios, some more developed and well-supported than others.
(At TeleoLogic, Mike also draws some interesting comparisons between ID and origin-of-life research.)
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