The current media flap about Intelligent Design and Darwinian evolution accepts the term Intelligent Design at face value. By implication Darwinian evolution is Idiot Design.
Actually, Idiot Design is a good characterization of evolution by selection from random variation. I will happily defend Idiot Design as should others who understand what Darwin discovered. There are many elements that characterize Darwin’s evolution and the part that is hardest to understand is that an idiotic process over a long enough period of time will give you the highly functioning and diverse inhabitants we live with.
Several concepts are not easily taught nor grasped. First, the selection processes in Idiot design is not selection of the fittest as generally taught. Survival of the fittest evokes the idea that the handsome high school footballer would get all the women and have the most children. He wouldn't.
The proper term should be survival of the fittingest. If an
intense pressure came upon humans, threatening their survival, it might
be something like large lung capacity that determined the survivors.
The genes for large lung capacity would trump the handsome footballer
on all counts. Idiot design is completely amoral … such surviving
large lung humans may also carry the genes to have no hair, be rude to their teachers
and insult school principals.
Second, idiot design does not rely on pure random variation. Random variation starts with the accumulation of incremental changes that have occurred over hundreds of millions of years. The random variation of humans does not include a set of humans without livers. Without livers the human wouldn’t be born. So random variation is applied only to attributes that are already sufficient to bring a species to birth.
Third, idiot design, because it is the work of idiocy and takes
infinite amounts of time, can be incredibly wasteful. The surviving
species can often survive because of one highly valuable survival
trait, such as large lung capacity cited above. In the new
environment, other useless idiot traits may turn out to be valuable.
The idiot design qualities of acne, little lips and belly buttons that
stick out may be valuable for survival along with the large lung
capacity.
Only idiot design would produce the world we live in because idiot design is purely empirical. Idiot design is just like our other most valuable empirical institutions: democracy, science, technology, law and commerce.