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to make the bonds instead. In a process similar to natural selection, one researcher made random alterations in the DNA-encoding thioredoxin and then subjected thousands of bacteria to the swim-or-starve test. He wanted to see if an altered version of thioredoxin could be coerced to make disulfides for other proteins in the bacteria. Remarkably, a mutant carrying only two amino acid changes, amounting to less than 2 percent of the total number of amino acids in thioredoxin, restored the ability of the bacteria to move. The altered thioredoxin was able to carry out disulfide bond formation in numerous other bacterial proteins all by itself, without relying on any of the components of the natural disulfide bond pathway. The mutant bacteria managed to solve the problem in time and swim away from starvation and multiply.

Bardwell concluded: “The naturally occurring enzymes involved in disulfide bond formation are a biological pathway whose main features are the same from bacteria to man. People often speak of Computer Assisted Design (CAD), where you try things out on a computer screen before you manufacture them. We put the bacteria we were working on under a strong genetic selection, like what can happen in evolution, and the bacteria came up with a completely new answer to the problem of how to form disulfide bonds. I think we can now talk about Genetic Assisted Design (GAD).”

Perhaps we should now talk about GAD instead of GOD.

8. The Conservation of Information and the Explanatory Filter. According to William Dembski, information cannot be created by either natural processes or chance, so there is a law of conservation of information, which indicates design. Furthermore, design can be inferred through what Dembski calls an explanatory filter in the following way:

1. If an event E has high probability, accept Regularity as an explanation; otherwise move to the next step.

2. If the Chance hypothesis assigns E a high probability or E is not specified, then accept Chance; otherwise move down the list.

3. Having eliminated Regularity and Chance, accept Design.

First, Dembski’s “Law of the Conservation of Information” is purposefully constructed to resemble such physical laws as the conservation of momentum or the laws of thermodynamics. But these laws were based on copious empirical data and experimental results, not inferred from logical argument as Dembski’s law is. Second, no other recognized theory of information—such as those by Shannon, Kolmogorov, or Chaitin—includes a law or principle of conservation, and no one working in the information sciences uses or recognizes Dembski’s law as legitimate, regardless of its design inference. Third, even if the law of the conservation of information were validated, it is irrelevant to the theory of evolution, because it is abundantly clear that information in the natural world—through DNA, for example—is transferred by natural processes. Fourth, the most common form of biological information transfer, DNA, in fact, has all the elements of historical contingency and evolutionary history, not design, as pointed out by evolutionary biologist Kenneth Miller.

In fact, the human genome is littered with pseudogenes, gene fragments, “orphaned” genes, “junk” DNA, and so many repeated copies of pointless DNA sequences that it cannot be attributed to anything that resembles ID. If the DNA of a human being or any other organism resembled a carefully constructed computer program, with neatly arranged and logically structured modules, each written to fulfill a specific function, the evidence of ID would be overwhelming. In fact, the genome resembles nothing so much as a hodgepodge of borrowed, copied, mutated, and discarded sequences and commands that have been cobbled together by millions of years of trial and error against the relentless test of survival. It works, and it works brilliantly, not because of intelligent design but because of the great blind power of natural selection to innovate, to test, and to discard what fails in favor of what succeeds.

As for Dembski