Daniel Dennett: Intelligent design? Show me the science

The never ending stream of articles critical of Intelligent Design have appeared since Bush made his ill-timed statement.

Daniel C. Dennett, a professor of philosophy at Tufts University, is the author of “Freedom Evolves” and “Darwin’s Dangerous Idea”, joins the virtual fray.

In Intelligent Design: Show me the science Dennett explores Intelligent Design.

Dennett wrote:

Is “intelligent design” a legitimate school of scientific thought? Is there something to it, or have these people been taken in by one of the most ingenious hoaxes in the history of science? Wouldn’t such a hoax be impossible? No. Here’s how it has been done.

Dennett correctly observes how natural selection is not only an observed process but it also has been shown to be able to generate “ingeneous designs”

Dennett wrote:

Well, yes - until you look at what contemporary biology has demonstrated beyond all reasonable doubt: that natural selection - the process in which reproducing entities must compete for finite resources and thereby engage in a tournament of blind trial and error from which improvements automatically emerge - has the power to generate breathtakingly ingenious designs.

As an example, Dennett discusses the evolution of the eye

Dennett wrote:

Take the development of the eye, which has been one of the favorite challenges of creationists. How on earth, they ask, could that engineering marvel be produced by a series of small, unplanned steps? Only an intelligent designer could have created such a brilliant arrangement of a shape-shifting lens, an aperture-adjusting iris, a light-sensitive image surface of exquisite sensitivity, all housed in a sphere that can shift its aim in a hundredth of a second and send megabytes of information to the visual cortex every second for years on end