A quote I found, while killing the time it takes to get from there to here:

"We should not imagine … that the struggle over spontaneous generation was a story of the triumph of materialism and empiricism over superstition and a priori natural philosophy. On the contrary, nineteenth-century materialists took sides against the biogenetic law, the rule of 'all life from life.' For if there were an unbridgeable gap between the nonliving and living, how could we explain the primal origin of life except by the infusion of a vital spirit into clay by a Promethean God? … Nothing could be more antimaterialist than the claim for the uniqueness of life"
Richard Lewontin, It Ain't Necessarily So: The Dream of the Human Genome and Other Illusions (New York Review, 2001), pp.112-3, original emphasis

I'm glad that I'm not an ID critic. Or at least not the sort that works the mainstream media (fyi, it is worth taking note that some otherwise intelligent, respectable scientists have sold their souls to the MSM and now regularly make quite stupid statements for the sake of "the cause" that they should be embarrassed to make – not just on both sides of the ID debate but also regarding other science/culture issues).

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If you've been following the rhetoric from many ID critics, you could be excused for thinking that ID was part of a vast right-wing conspiracy, designed by creationists to have Christianity taught in science class. Unfortunately, reality is much too messy to fit into sound-bite labelled boxes, as illustrated by YEC Dr. Georgia Purdom, speaking at the 2005 Creation Mega Conference about the problems with ID.

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Since the debate concerning intelligent design is drawing more and more public attention in the press and the media, there seems to be a growing number of people who sense there is something important going on who also want to get the straight scoop of things. Problem is that since the debate really stems from battling worldviews, it can be very difficult for those who are not deeply involved in the debate to get as an objective a picture as they would like. Why is that? Because of spin.

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Recently, I blogged on David Barash's misguided attack on ID. Apparently, Barash's article sparked many letters in reply and PZ Myers has recently come to his defense. Myers tells us what Barash's real argument was about:

As is common, these writers completely misunderstand the argument from imperfections that Barash presents; they treat it as an argument for atheism, rather than evolution. It isn't. It can be used as an extremely hypothetical argument about the nature of god, I suppose, which is how these writers treat it and as Barash briefly mentions (admitting that these observations could be accounted for by a god of "incompetence or sheer malevolence"), but as an argument for evolution, this is irrelevant. These imperfections are seen as relics of our past history, and indicate that we did have a complex history"”we were not born as a species with no heritage from our forebears.

I'm not buying it.

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Ken Miller recently wrote an essay in response to Cardinal Schönborn's piece in the New York Times.

Miller writes:

Neo-Darwinism, he tells us, is an ideology proposing that an "unguided, unplanned process of random variation and natural selection" gave rise to all life on earth, including our own species. To be sure, many evolutionists have made such assertions in their popular writings on the "meaning" on evolutionary theory. But are such assertions truly part of evolution as it is understood by the "mainstream biologists" of which the Cardinal speaks?

Miller answers, "Not at all." Really?

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Apparently there are evolutionists who are now wanting to distance themselves from the term "Darwinism". See Denyse O'Leary's site here and William Dembski's here. Does this bespeak the end times for the label and the paradigm with it? Will it just go quietly into that good night, displaced by some new non-telic flavor of the month? I don't think so. Why? Because it is such an appealing framework for the many who advocate it. But what's the appeal?

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It looks like Oxford University is going ahead with its plans to build a new research facility. But there's a problem: "Hundreds of animal rights activists marched through Oxford in protest at a new animal testing laboratory."

Actually, it's worse than this.

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Paul Nelson has a nice blog about scientists getting concerned about their dependency on teleological concepts and language.

Speaking of Rudy Raff, Nelson writes:

His most recent, "Stand up for evolution" (Evolution and Development 7 [July 2005]:273-275), advises biologists to police their own language when describing biological systems. As Raff writes:

…let us not play into the hands of ID propagandists. For instance, be careful about using teleological words to describe biological entities in our teaching and writing. Calling cells "machines that do X," or describing biological structures as "well designed to do Y" will be duly cited in ID propaganda as one more biologist-supporting design.

Nelson then follows with some clever commentary. But I have a dream.

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…engineers need biologists. So says David Low in the most recent edition of Convergence a premiere journal for Systems Biology. Very well said and something the intelligent design community needs to help fascillitate.

Here's an excerpt from the journal:

Khammash and collaborators including Hana El-Samad, who recently earned her doctorate in mechanical engineering at UCSB, have used mathematical modeling to show how the complex workings of the heat-shock [of E. coli] response reflect features that make the protein repair fast, robust and efficient. "It is how, if you had a good engineer, the process would be designed," he says.

Good engineer? Bet you won't see that quote appear in any anti-teleologist's BuzzBox. Imagine what would happen if the bad/sloppy design argument had pervasive counter-examples?
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In their article, Behe, Biochemistry, and the Invisible Hand, Niall Shanks and Karl Joplin begin their abstract as follows:

In this essay we take creationist biochemist Michael Behe to task for failing to make an evidentially grounded case for the supernatural intelligent design of biochemical systems.

In the future, we shall take a closer look at this article, but for now, pay attention to the two adjectives "“ "˜creationist' and "˜supernatural.'

Why did Shanks and Joplin freely choose to label Behe, a theistic evolutionist, as a creationist?

Why did Shanks and Joplin freely choose to add the label "˜supernatural?'
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Sean B. Carroll
PLoS Biol 2005, 3(7): e245
Open Access Link

Conclusion:
The hypothesis of regulatory evolution put forward by King and Wilson 30 years ago was founded entirely on negative data, that is, the apparent insufficiency of coding sequence divergence to account for gross organismal differences. It has required several decades to obtain evidence that regulatory sequences are so often the basis for the evolution of form that, when considering the evolution of anatomy (including neural circuitry), regulatory sequence evolution should be the primary hypothesis considered. The analysis of regulatory sequence evolution poses particular challenges in that it is impossible to distinguish meaningless from functional changes by mere inspection. But, in nonhuman models where extensive experimental tools are available, there is cause for optimism that the contribution of regulatory sequences to evolution will be increasingly well understood in the near term. In order to approach the origins of human traits, much greater emphasis has to be placed on comparative studies of gene expression, regulation, and development in apes and other primates. This is precisely the requirement forecast by King and Wilson 30 years ago, only now we have the means to meet it.

This looks like a worthwhile conference:

The Developmental Basis of Evolutionary Change

To Whom It May Concern:

We ask that you might forward this message to individuals or listservs in your department or institution that may find this announcement of interest.

First Announcement and Call for Abstracts:

We announce the fourth biennial conference on the Developmental Basis of Evolutionary Change at the University of Chicago during 20-23 October 2005. This four-day, graduate student-organized conference has a tradition of assembling, at the intersection of evolution and development, a fellowship of faculty and student conferees of diverse intellectual interests. As such, it has been a fertile occasion for initiating unexpected collaborations and probing new ideas.
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In my previous entry, I used a particular hypothesis from Richard Dawkins to drive home a larger point. I argued there is no objective criterion that is used to convert a hypothesis into history. On the contrary, the transformation is ultimately a decision. We can try to make the decision as objective as possible by appealing to evidence and the consensus of a community, but it nevertheless remains less than objective. Unfortunately, it can be worse than this.

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Check out this article by Roald Hoffmann on the relationship between science and story. The points made in the article do a good job of justifying the intelligent design theorists task of "retelling the biotic story". Notice that there is no anti-realism here…just the view that science works by telling stories about what we observe in nature. (the realism is in the verification by observation)

All theories tell a story. They have a beginning, in which people and ideas, models, molecules and governing equations take the stage. Their roles are defined; there is a puzzle to solve. Einstein sets his characters into motion so ingeniously, using entropy to tease out the parallels between moving molecules and the energy of light. The story develops; there are consequences of Einstein's approach. And at the end, his view of light as quantized and particular confronts the reality of the heretofore unexplained photoelectric effect. The postscripted future, of all else that can be understood and all new things that can be made, is implicit.