In his Jan. 13 Open Forum column, Professor Arthur Shapiro wrote that intelligent design "is just the New Yorker cartoon of savages observing an erupting volcano and concluding that 'the gods are angry.' … it is empty of scientific content." Professor McCurdy then published a related article in the Jan. 27 Open Forum and declared that "Science requires a testable hypothesis and an observer willing to alter the hypothesis based on experimental evidence. Intelligent Design offers neither of these."

I hope to persuade professors Shapiro, McCurdy and others that they should reconsider their position. Good science does not always include experimentation; the essential element is a systematic method for pursuing knowledge. Properly understood, ID has much to offer the scientific community. ID does not attempt to study the supernatural; rather, it seeks reliable methods for detecting intelligent agency regardless of the source of the intelligence.

There is no controversy when scientists in areas other than biology recognize intelligent agency: for example, when an archaeologist recognizes that a particular stone was deliberately shaped for some purpose, or someone examines an electromagnetic wave to determine whether it has an intelligent cause or is the result of some natural phenomenon (as in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence).

Intelligence is the only possible source of significant amounts of information (by "significant" I intend to rule out crystal structures and other patterns explainable by fixed physical laws). Surely it is a valuable scientific endeavor to determine the limits of what is achievable by unintelligent natural causes. For example, if there are limits to the adaptability of bacteria, the problem of antibiotic resistance might be solvable. If there are no limits, that would be evidence against the proposition that intelligent agency can be reliably detected.

So why is ID derided by so many? Because it challenges Darwinism. By Darwinism I mean the belief that unguided evolution explains the existence of all biological diversity. Professor McCurdy says that "science is not truth." But science certainly seeks to find true knowledge and, as such, it is important to recognize when the conclusions we draw from the evidence are heavily influenced by our presuppositions.

The theory of evolution deals with the fact that biological systems adapt and change over time by undirected natural means, and I, along with all the members of the ID community I know, would agree that this occurs. Darwinism is, however, very different. Perhaps the best way to illustrate the difference between the two and how they are frequently confused is to tell a story.

In April 2000 I attended a talk given by Dr. Christian de Duve (who was a co-winner of the 1974 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine) and during the talk he held up a manila folder that, he claimed, contained absolute proof that evolution, by which he meant Darwinism, was true. He later shared the contents of the folder with me. It was a fascinating presentation on the evolution of horses, tracing the changes in the DNA and the resulting morphological changes in the animals. The problem is that all of the animals were still horses. Does it also explain horse flies?

There is a wealth of evidence for evolution, but Darwinism is qualitatively different and is an audacious theory for which we should require a correspondingly large amount of evidence. It is not all that surprising that a horse can evolve into a different horse, or that bacteria can evolve to become resistant to a particular antibiotic. If no completely new structures are required, there is no need for a significant amount of new information. But it would be very surprising if an animal that lived in the ocean evolved to crawl out on land and then evolved wings and started to fly.

The evidence for Darwinism is weak. For example, the morphological and genetic similarities between species argue just as persuasively for a common designer as they do for common descent, and structures with no clear purpose, or that are non-optimal, are present in all adaptive systems, even those designed by human engineers.

The DNA in a human cell is said to contain more information than the 30-volume Encyclopedia Britannica. But where does this information come from? To the best of my knowledge, no one has ever demonstrated that random processes plus selection rules can produce significant amounts of new information. Absent even a putative natural mechanism for the generation of significant amounts of information, Darwinism stands on fatally weak legs.

If you agree with Carl Sagan that "the cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be" then Darwinism necessarily follows. Given this presupposition, there must be an undirected natural explanation for the existence of all biological systems. But that statement is an unprovable presupposition; let's not confuse it with science.

Richard Spencer is a professor of electrical and computer engineering.