So, along with their October issue, Wired has published a Geekipedia supplement, 149 People, Places, Ideas & Trends You Need To Know, and nestled between innovation and internet radio is intelligent design.

An intricate organ like the eye relies on specialized parts, none of which work without the others. It’s hard to imagine, they say, such a system evolving by natural selection (although the work of scientists like Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Dawkins provides some ideas on how it might happen). Their preferred explanation: an “intelligent designer” who drafted the blueprint for life.

The Geek’s treatment is just a bit better than Wikipedia (not hard to accomplish), but needs some help. For instance, they claim: “And since it can’t be tested, they add, it’s not a theory at all.” Of course, this is false — intelligent design ideas are testable. (Something is empirically testable when it is either falsifiable, confirmable, or both. Moreover, something can be confirmable but not falsifiable, as with the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) or the existence of a cosmic designer. Both of these claims are still empirically testable. See here, here, here. And here. Oh, and here too.)

Clearly, intelligent design as an idea isn’t going away. If anything, it is gaining momentum and popularity among the public as they learn more about it.