I write this letter in response to Steven Foong's letter ' An intelligent designer in the origins of life? '

With all due respect to Mr Foong, evolutionary theory has gone far beyond 'Darwinism' to include all what we know today about molecular genetics and biological systems. Scientists have seen microevolution in action and there's no reason to believe that macroevolution couldn't happen according to the theory as it exists today not 140 years ago.

As for intelligent design; it is not a scientific theory despite its proponents' insistence that it can be. It is actually science in reverse. Intelligent design often must assume design in order to prove that there is a designer but always fails to explain the nature and origin of the designer. Without proof of a designer the main hypothesis of this "theory" crumbles.

The intelligent design argument hinges upon the notion of "irreducibly complex systems," or systems that could not function if they were missing just one of their many parts. Irreducibly complex systems cannot evolve in a Darwinian fashion, they say, because natural selection works on small mutations in just one component at a time. They then leap to the conclusion that intelligent design must be responsible for these irreducibly complex systems.

But natural selection and molecular genetics can explain this since complex, interlocking biological systems do not evolve as individual parts, despite the intelligent design proponents' claim that they must. They evolve together, as systems that are gradually expanded, enlarged, and adapted to new purposes.

Sure such things can be explained by the existence of a designer but they don't need to be as evolution acting over hundreds of thousands or millions of years and in accordance to the principles of molecular genetics and the laws of physics can explain them also. Evolution also explains the redundancy found in molecular biological systems and the vast amounts of useless material in our DNA. A designer would certainly be much neater about it.

A true theory is one that inspires new experiments and provides unexpected insights into familiar phenomena. By this standard, Darwinism is one of the best theories in the history of science. It has produced countless important experiments (let's re-create a natural species in the lab - yes, that's been done) and sudden insight into once puzzling patterns (that's why there are no native land mammals on oceanic islands). In the nearly ten years since the popularization of intelligent design theory, it has inspired no nontrivial experiments and has provided no surprising insights into biology.

In short intelligent design tends to look more like politicking than real science and has absolutely no place in any classroom anywhere. It is a pseudoscience that looks more like metaphysics, theology or philosophy. It is just creation theory wrapped in a shiny new package and offers nothing new to scientific discovery.