"Please don't report on our ID conference"

It's a long read and some goes over the head of a layman like me, but it's a great read, too. A rational thinker sits in on a 2007 "conference" of Intelligent Design (ID) proponents, and deconstructs the proceedings in the light of actual science.

There's a lot of good response within to the arguments put forth by ID proponents. The best part is the conclusion, showing how ID plants the seeds of its own clumsy disassembly:

ID dooms itself. In their own words at this conference, IDers espouse a program in which the scope and power of the Designer is restricted to purely human dimensions, in which the effects of the Designer on biological diversity have left no discernible trace that can be detected scientifically, in which the effects of Darwinian processes are the only biological phenomena that can be studied scientifically, and in which Darwinian processes are overwhelmingly more powerful than those of the Designer (because they inevitably cause the Designer’s creations to degenerate). For example, it must be evil Darwinian processes that produce emerging infectious diseases, otherwise each pathogen would remain associated only with the host for which it was designed. This is all just too silly.

Among other highlights, I loved the scene in which an IDist accidentally reveals experimental evidence of a Darwinian-style beneficial mutation, bringing the proceedings to a crashing halt. Even better: when it was all over, the author received an email "stating that the ID people considered the conference a private meeting, and did not want any of us to discuss it, blog it, or publish anything about it". (Translation: "Oh God, what if the big kid scientists see us having our little dress-up tea party?")

I've been eagerly following the science-vs-ID debate for some time, and so far have seen nothing of substance in the latter beyond "We so want it to be true, so it must be". I can't wait for more.