Dumb Design

Intelligent design enthusiasts (IDists) postulate that an unidentified intelligent designer is responsible for some or all of the features of living organisms.

Evolutionary and related sciences aim to explain their features without invoking an intelligent designer.

When "dumb design" features are pointed out to IDists the response is either that 1) a design has deteriorated since it was first implemented, 2) not all features of living organisms were designed, 3) the intelligent designer is intelligent, but not that intelligent and competent, or 4) we just don't understand enough to explain, but it must have been intelligently designed for some reason known only to the intelligent designer.

In making the intelligent designer unidentifiable (a requirement for those who wish to distance IDism from creation "science" as much as possible, and in avoiding trying to describe it and its motivations and possible limitations, IDists make IDism unfalsifiable. Any feature, whatever it is, can be accounted for by IDism. This is what makes IDism worthless as science. The data does not matter.

Aside from being unfalsifiable, IDism also fails on another measure of scientific value, parsimony. Ockham's Razor. In the words of Sir Isaac Newton, "We are to admit no more causes of natural things than such as are both true and sufficient to explain their appearances. Therefore, to the same natural effects we must, as far as possible, assign the same causes." IOW, choose the simplest explanation that explains the facts. In Ben Stein's interview with Richard Dawkins, in the infamous film, "Expelled", Dawkins explains that even if little green men from outer space intelligently designed life and seeded it on earth, it wouldn't explain the origin of the little green men. We would just be adding a complication for which there is no good evidence, therefore for no necessity.

In comparing IDism and science as explanations for the details of the living world, there is another factor. How well do these details fit each proffered explanation? We have seen that ID "fits" any of the details, whatever they are, making it of no interest to science. But what about science? It says that evolution is mindless. Non teleological. It cannot look ahead. Probabilistically, It cannot traverse large 'distances' in the fitness landscape, so it can lead species up blind alleys to extinction, even though there are fitness peaks, niches, relatively nearby that an intelligent designer could, presumably, equip them to occupy. This limitation is a prediction of evolutionary science. Why an "intelligent" designer would be constrained to mimic the limitations of evolution is a question that the IDists need to consider. 

And yes, there are puzzles and questions raised and poorly understood by science, but as we have seen, "the designer done it" is no form of explanation. Science progresses by tackling problems and puzzles. ID just fobs us off with an 'explanation' that is no real explanation at all.