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quite a bit. In particular, some people believe that intelligent design is concerned only with biological organisms, while others believe it can be used to detect design anywhere. Nevertheless, trying to stick rather close to Behe, and for the purposes of this article, let me define intelligent design to be the "science" of detecting design in a system, in particular a biological one.

But is intelligent design science? Well, it certainly begins with an observation. (Behe's book contains several long explanations of how certain biochemical systems work.) We then develop a hypothesis: this system was designed. Can we test that hypothesis? Behe says yes, there are two things we can look for in a system to indicate design. The system must serve a purpose, and the system must be highly complex. If it doesn't pass these two tests, then we reject the design hypothesis.

As a side note, you may wonder how we can measure complexity, and how we can know when a system is complex enough. And there is indeed no hard line. You can think of some variables to include in a measurement of complexity; the number of parts a system has is important, for example. But regardless, we all have some idea of when a system is complex, and it would hardly be the first observation in science that was not perfectly quantifiable.

So, you may wish to conclude that intelligent design is in fact a science, and stop reading here. Or you may be thinking, "but wait, isn't there another hypothesis to explain biological systems that are both complex and serve a purpose?" And of course there is, Darwinian evolution. So what do we do? If both hypotheses pass all the tests we can devise for them, then we're in a bit of a pickle as to knowing which is correct. This is where the idea of irreducible complexity comes in.

Irreducible complexity is essentially a test to see if a system could have evolved in a Darwinian manner. That is, could the system form as the result of a succession of small changes? How exactly the test is applied will depend on the system that is being considered. Basically, we examine a complex system and determine whether it requires many parts to function. If yes, would removing any one of these parts make the system useless? If the answer to this question is yes, then we need to see if we can nevertheless come up with a plan by which the system could have gradually evolved, with each stage of its evolution itself being an improvement over the previous stage so that natural selection would prefer it. If we can come up with no such plan, that we conclude that it is highly unlikely that the system evolved in a purely Darwinian manner, and pick the intelligent design hypothesis.

Learn more about this author, David Shane.
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