NOW is an uncomfortable time to be a Darwinist in the US. Eighty
years after the infamous "monkey trial", when John Scopes was
tried for teaching evolution, pressure on Darwin's theory is
growing once again. Creationist voices are becoming louder, and
a new player is adding to the noise. Intelligent design (ID)
uses the language of science to argue that we will never
understand nature unless we take the supernatural into account.
Although ID has been around for more than a decade, it has only
recently started to make a significant impact on university
campuses and school boards, which decide what pupils are taught
(see "Too much TV isn't smart"). Its advocates argue that
various biological structures are too complex to have been
created by natural selection and so must have been designed. To
press home their case, they introduce two concepts. "Irreducible
complexity" proposes that some molecular systems, ... To
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