My first exposure to intelligent design detection in science took place during a summer job with National Defence Research in 1978 as an engineering student. It was during the Cold War, and my assignment was to write software that could detect Soviet submarines amidst the full range of background noise in the ocean. I successfully completed this project by utilizing, among other things, a fast Fourier transform applied to underwater acoustic signals to isolate the signature of Soviet subs.

Despite misconceptions in the popular media, intelligent design plays a major role in science. It does so in three different aspects:

Design application: the application of intelligence to first principles in physics to produce a desired effect (e.g., a smartphone). Design derivation: the reverse engineering of a complex effect back to first principles of physics for the purpose of discovering the design process and application (e.g., one company or country reverse-engineering the technology of another company or country). Design detection: the analysis of effects to determine which required intelligence to produce and which could be produced by nature (e.g., searching for the acoustic signature of a submarine amidst the natural background noise of the ocean).

From the three categories noted above, a possible definition of intelligent design can be formulated as follows:

Intelligent design: an effect that required an intelligent mind to produce.

Examples of intelligent design that satisfy the above definition include smartphones, genetically modified plants, a text message, Beethoven’s Fifth, a flint spear point, and CERN’s Large Hadron Collider.

A Unique Signature of Intelligence

Design detection is firmly entrenched in science, including forensic science, defence research, SETI, archeology, and biology. In each area, a variety of methods are used, but the core aspect of all of them can be quantified in terms of functional information (defined in the literature by Szostak, Hazen et al., and Durston et al.). In layman’s terms, functional information is the information required to produce a desired effect. A testable, verifiable, and falsifiable hypothesis that is highly useful to design detection can be stated as follows:

Hypothesis: A unique property of intelligent minds is the ability to produce statistically significant levels of functional information as defined in the literature.

A key word here is “unique”; intelligence is the only thing with enough intellectual horsepower to produce significant levels of functional information. The above hypothesis is certainly testable and falsifiable. To falsify it, all we need is to verify a natural, mindless process that will produce statistically significant levels of functional information.