Unintelligent design

With all this controversy about "intelligent design" as an alternative to evolutionary theory, let us step back for a minute and think about what the world would have been like had it been the product of Unintelligent Design.

With intelligent design, you would of course have the leader of a country who was articulate, well-informed, reality-based, and highly ethical. With Unintelligent Design, that leader would get into office by stealing the election, would pursue ruinous social and economic policies based on lies, relentlessly pummel the populace with slogans and verbal pabulum that had no relationship to the facts, and unconscionably take refuge in willful ignorance to protect himself from the immeasurable human suffering produced by his policies. With an intelligently designed world, people would have the natural intelligence to perceive what was going on in such a case and quickly oust the pretender, restoring the social system to its optimal state. Conversely, in an unintelligent design, they would easily succumb to the stupefying effects of mass media, of tendentious pundits telling them what to believe, so that the hideous perversion of democratic ideals could be allowed to fester with impunity.

But if, as we are exhorted by the Discovery Institute, the theory of intelligent design should share equal billing with evolution in the schools, then so should the theory of Unintelligent Design, because it perhaps explains some phenomena that the other theories do not. The devolution of human being into chimp, for example, seen lately at the highest levels, is inadequately dealt with by Darwin; it is here that the burgeoning science of Unintelligent Design truly shines. And yet, despite the continued elaboration of these sophisticated theories, there will always remain the entreaty lingering pathetically on our lips: "Say it ain't so, Lord!"