Intelligent Design
Intelligent Design (aka "incompetent design" aka "Creationism in a clown suit"[1]) claims to be a scientific alternative to Evolution for explaining how life came be on Earth. In reality, it is nothing more than a dishonest attempt to evade separation of church and state laws in the United States after Creationism was ruled a violation of them. Several creationist books suddenly changed their terminology after this ruling. "Creation" changed to "ID", "God" changed to "intelligent cause/agent", etc.
Content
ID proposes that some features of living organisms are too complex to have evolved naturally. Therefore some higher power must have intervened to specifically create those features, which the "theory" describes as "irreducibly complex". In other words, it is a colossal appeal to ignorance fallacy.
The primary argument is that removing part of an "irreducibly complex" structure causes it to not function. However, this claim is misleading at best.
- Numerous features described by ID proponents as "irreducibly complex" have turned out not to be upon serious study.
- While the components of such a structure don't perform its particular function, they do often perform other useful functions of their own, showing that dependency on the combined structure developed after the separate components.
- While a given species might be unable to survive without one of its "irreducibly complex" features, ancestors and even modern relatives of that species can be found that survive(d) quite well without it.