One of the benefits of real intelligent design is encouragement of reverse engineering to understand how nature works and how to correct problems in nature (disease, for example)–and to provoke new inventions. (Spare us the argument that because you have a trick knee and an appendix you couldn’t have been designed. You should meet my old Taurus; it was designed, too, and it was still a rattletrap.)

Some scientists seem to be making the design connection, as this AP story indicates, but as Bill Dembski “cattily” says, they don’t want to own up to what they are doing. Instead of worrying about a bogus “theological clash” with intelligent design scientists (whose theory definition the AP once again mangles), the folks at Georgia Tech should sit down and talk to them. It seems to be too much to expect wire service reporters to try to understand what ID theorists are really saying (as opposed to what their adversaries assert that they are saying), but that shouldn’t be the case with real scientists, Darwinists or not. At some point they can see whether they get better leads from an evolutionary model or an ID model.

“Every organism is designed to solve a problem,” Dr. Weissburg says. Good, now let’s test that claim in more than one way.