[+/-] (Un)intelligent design

Chris Mooney has written a good piece on the differences and similarities between creationists and the "Intelligent Design" (ID) folks.

[A]s far as its strategic behavior goes, ID actually appears to represent a kind of natural culmination of the 'creation science' movement, which originated in the 1960s and 1970s for specific legal and educational reasons. When compared to 'creation science' on a strategic level, it turns out that ID proceeds still further in the direction of PR-oriented pseudoscience and the denial of religious intentions in argument. In fact, we can detect many rudimentary elements of the current ID approach among earlier advocates of 'creation science'—though ID has improved and perfected them.

Are the ID folks rehashing the old Argument From Design? Seems so. Perhaps they should have sit in on my freshman year intro to philosophy class; maybe they would have learned something. I like the way Richard Dawkins puts it in The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe without Design:

To explain the origin of the DNA/protein machine by invoking a supernatural Designer is to explain precisely nothing, for it leaves unexplained the origin of the Designer. You have to say something like 'God was always there', and if you allow yourself that kind of lazy way out, you might as well just say 'DNA was always there', or 'Life was always there', and be done with it.