Intelligent design

Intelligent design is the claim that some features of life are best explained by an intelligent cause rather than natural processes. Its advocates argue that biological complexity can reveal such design without identifying the designer.

Irreducible complexity: The claim that some systems cannot function if any of their parts are removed, so they could not evolve through successive modifications. Michael Behe uses this claim to argue that some molecular systems require design.
Creationism: The belief that the universe or living things originated through divine creation. Intelligent design developed within debates historically associated with creationism.
Michael Behe: An American biochemist who argues that some biological systems are irreducibly complex and therefore designed. His book Darwin’s Black Box made irreducible complexity a signature design argument.
Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District: A 2005 federal case that barred a Pennsylvania school district from presenting intelligent design as an alternative to evolution in biology class. The trial examined the movement’s history, scientific claims, and proposed classroom policy.
Evolution by natural selection: A process in which heritable traits that improve reproductive success become more common across generations. It accounts for adaptation without invoking an intelligent cause.
Specified complexity: A proposed measure of patterns that are both highly improbable and independently specified by a recognizable pattern. William Dembski presents it as a way to identify outcomes caused by intelligence.
Of Pandas and People: A 1989 biology textbook that argues for intelligent design while criticizing evolution. Its drafts reveal the movement’s shift from the phrase “creation science” to “intelligent design.”
William A. Dembski: An American mathematician and philosopher who developed arguments involving specified complexity and design detection. He sought to formalize how intelligent causes might be inferred from biological information.
Dover Area School District: A Pennsylvania public-school district whose 2004 policy required students to hear a statement about intelligent design in biology class. Its policy prompted the landmark federal challenge to teaching intelligent design.
Theistic evolution: The view that evolutionary processes are compatible with divine creation or providence. Unlike intelligent design, it generally accepts evolution as the scientific account of biological change.

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