One problem is that seemingly random strings often contain patterns discernible only with mathematical tests. Dr. Dembski wondered whether he could devise a way to find evidence of related patterns in the randomness of nature. Dr. Dembski has applied his explanatory filter to the biochemical structures in cells - and concluded that blind natural selection could not have created them. But in a detailed critique of Dr. Dembski's filter theory, published in the current issue of the magazine The Skeptical Inquirer, Dr. Taner Edis, a physicist at Truman State University in Kirksville, Mo., said that while Dr. Dembski's mathematics were impressive, his analysis was probably detecting only the complexity that evolution itself would normally produce. At least they make an effort to get rid of some of the blatantly fundamentalist elements of creationism.
Most biologists disagree.
Dr. Orr said that cell structures might have been put together in all sorts of unpredictable ways over the course of evolution and that a protein added might not have been indispensable at first, but only later, when many more proteins were woven around it. Exactly how a designer might have assembled cell structures, say, is a question seldom addressed by design theorists. Dr. Behe, Dr. Dembski and Phillip E. Johnson, a professor emeritus of the law school at the University of California at Berkeley, are regarded as the intellectual fathers of the design theory movement. The book focuses on what Mr. Johnson says are the difficulties Darwinian theory has in explaining the fossil record. Until last fall, Dr. Dembski was the director of a center at Baylor that was dedicated to the study of intelligent design theory.