The Guardian as created a Creationism special podcast, interviewing the ironically named Truth in Science who distributed "intelligent design" material to all the schools in Britain.
The Guardian uses the term "controversy" twice in the text there; let's be quite clear about this: There is no controversy over the teaching of Evolution. The only controversy is that created in the minds of the religious who are upset that the facts of nature do not appear to match their dogmatic view of christianity - that their god, not evolution, created the diversity of life on this planet.
The belief in intelligent design - that some organic processes are too complex to have arrived at by evolution alone - is not just wrong, it is also both intellectually lazy, and - worse - boring
There is nothing interesting in the view that life was created by an intelligent designer whose attributes are deliberately left un-spoken. It only shifts the problem. If intelligent life created life, then what created the intelligent life to create life? What process did it go through to create life? How did it itself evolve, or come in to existence? These questions would be interesting if they were posed, and the existence of a creator really was necessary, but they aren't. Intelligent design quite deliberately avoids these questions like the plague (one presumes, incidentally, that the intelligent designer must necessarialy also have created plauges).
What about another hypothesis: the unintelligent designer? Or the deliberately negligent designer? The psychopathic designer? Surely these would be attributes better placed on an entity that deliberately created the brutal and harsh life that we actually observe. If a designer is ever shown to be necessary for abiogenesis, then I don't think attaching the label "intelligent" to it does the english language any favours. Perhaps just the Blind Watchmaker
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