How Does Intelligent Design Apply to Biology?
As we saw earlier, one of the central claims of intelligent design (ID) is that “intelligent causes are necessary to explain the complex, information-rich structures of biology.” The more we learn about living organisms, the more they look like products of design rather than products of chance and natural law. Ironically, many opponents of intelligent design concede this fact. Oxford biologist Richard Dawkins, for example, says “Biology is the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose.” [1] Similarly, in a recent issue of the biology journal Cell, Bruce Alberts, a leading cell biologist and president of the National Academy of Sciences, wrote: We have always underestimated cells. The entire cell can be viewed as a factory that contains an elaborate network of interlocking assembly lines, each of which is composed of a set of large protein machines. Why do we call the large protein assemblies that underlie cell function protein machines?
