Resolved: Intelligent design should be taught in American public schools.

Intelligent design is not a credible science nor theory when analyzed from a scientific perspective. The validity of ID has been challenged by the American scientific community, and the results of the general analysis of evidence of the theory points to the idea that ID possesses too little evidence to conclude the validity of the arguments therein, both from a theoretical and empirical perspective:"Irreducible complexity asserts that certain biochemical systems in nature contain parts that are too well matched to be products of evolution. Every part of an irreducibly complex system is necessary: take away even one, and the entire system will no longer work. Because their parts are so intricate and so interdependent, such systems could not possibly have been the result of evolution, ID supporters argue. .. "The logic of their argument is you have these multipart systems, and that the parts within them are useless on their own," said Kenneth Miller, a biologist at BrownUniversity in Rhode Island. "The instant that I or anybody else finds a subset of parts that has a function, that argument is destroyed. " Viewed this way, all of the systems that Behe claims to be irreducibly complex really aren't. A subset of the bacterial flagellum proteins, for example, are used by other bacteria to inject toxins into other cells and several of the proteins in the human blood-clotting system are believed to be modified forms of proteins found in the digestive system. "The second major argument for intelligent design comes from William Dembski, a mathematician and philosopher affiliated with the Discovery Institute, a Seattle-based Christian think tank that serves as the nerve center for the ID movement. Dembski argues that nature is rife with examples of non-random patterns of information that he calls "complex specified information," or CSI for short. To qualify as CSI, the information must be both complex and specified. The letter "A," for example, is specific but not complex. A string of random letters such as "slfkjwer," on the other hand, is complex but not necessarily specific. A Shakespearean sonnet, however, is both complex and specific. An example of CSI from nature is DNA, the molecule found in all cells that contains the genetic instructions for life. DNA is made up of four repeating chemical bases arranged into complimentary pairs. The bases can be thought of as "letters" in a four-letter alphabet and can be strung together to form genes, which can be thought of as the "words" that tell the cell what proteins to make. The human genome is made up of some 3 billion DNA base pairs and contains about 25,000 genes. DNA is obviously complex. The fact that humans always give birth to humans and not chimpanzees or naked mole rats shows that DNA is also specific. The fact that CSI exists in nature is evidence for design because intelligence is necessary to produce CSI, Dembski says. This is the part of Dembski's argument that many scientists have trouble with. The nylon problem There is a way to settle this, however, because like Behe's irreducible complexity, the concept of specified complexity can also be tested. "If Dembski were right, then a new gene with new information conferring a brand new function on an organism could never come into existence without a designer because a new function requires complex specified information," Miller said. In 1975, Japanese scientists reported the discovery of bacteria that could break down nylon, the material used to make pantyhose and parachutes. Bacteria are known to ingest all sorts of things, everything from crude oil to sulfur, so the discovery of one that could eat nylon would not have been very remarkable if not for one small detail: nylon is synthetic; it didn't exist anywhere in nature until 1935, when it was invented by an organic chemist at the chemicalcompany Dupont. The discovery of nylon-eating bacteria poses a problem for ID proponents. Where did the CSI for nylonase—the actual protein that the bacteria use to break down the nylon—come from? hauling around a nylonase gene before the invention of nylon is at best useless to the bacteria; at worst, it could be harmful or lethal. Secondly, the nylonase enzyme is less efficient than the precursor protein it's believed to have developed from. Thus, if nylonase really was designed by a Supreme Being, it wasn't done very intelligently. "Why scientists dismiss intelligent design"--MSNBC