Interestingly enough Darwinian biology has some of the same problems that intelligent design has.

For Darwinians providing a precise definition of species has always been a problem. In a recent article, Massimo Pigliucci offers some help from philosophy. First he notes:

It is not by chance that Darwin titled the most important book ever written in biology (and possibly in the whole of science), On the Origin of Species. It isn't that people don't have a choice: a recent count by R.L. Mayden lists a whopping 21 different concepts of species proposed in the literature! Part of the problem is that biologists (and some, but not all, philosophers) keep adopting an essentialist concept of species: there has to be one right way to think of the problem, and hence one unique solution, which we would surely find if only we had more data (say biologists) or thought a bit harder (say some philosophers).

Massimo's solution to the species problem is to adopt Wittgenstein's family resemblance criterion.

There is another, though not necessarily incompatible, solution, which makes use of the work of philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. In his Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein proposed the idea of cluster, or "˜family resemblance', concepts: some terms by their nature do not admit of an essentialist definition, but are rather characterized by a diffuse network of more or less loosely interconnected properties. … Not only special purposes (like the very different works of a paleontologist and a geneticist), but also different classes of living organisms (a bacterium vs. a reptile) may require us to think of species as concepts made of a loose cluster of characteristics, some of which turn out to be particularly useful "“ while some do not apply "“ in any given circumstance.

The interesting thing about this solution is that it could just as easily be applied to the problem of design inference. Trying to come up with an essentialist characterization of design may run into the same problems as that of species, beauty, simplicity, order, etc. It's not hard to find examples of this issue in science.

Physicist David Bohm here:

First you have to ask what we mean by order. Everybody has some tacit notion of it, but order itself is impossible to define.

Stephen Weinberg:

There is no logical formula that establishes a sharp dividing line between a beautiful explanatory theory and a mere list of data, but we know the difference when we see it.¹

How many times has it been said, "I may not …, but I know it when I see it." The philosopher Michael Polanyi claims that tacit knowing, "We know more than we can say.²" is the starting point for all knowing. How well that tacit knowing can be explicated in detail comes back to the age old issue of reductionism vs. holism.

It seems to me that quite often scientists are in denial about how much they rely on tacit knowing and family resemblances to do their work. In fact, particularly in biology, those family resemblances are used as evidence for theories(the fossil record, for instance). But design artifacts also have family resemblances. That's why someone familiar with design can detect design, different types of design, design quality, design methods, and non-design. The problem with this for some scientists is that they rebel against something so "imprecise" as tacit sensing. To me this is a throw back to the Enlightenment dream that science will provide indisputable truth. I don't know of any philosopher of science today who would support that dream. So if family resemblances are the solution to the species question, why not the design question as well?

References:
1 Weinberg, Dreams of a Final Theory, (Vintage Books, 1993) pp. 148-9.
2 Michael Polanyi, Tacit Dimension (Smith Peter, 1983)

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