It is a
rhetorical folly to toss
intelligent design (ID) in the same bin as
creationism and attempt to use the same arguments to disprove it.
The fact that the current batch of ID proponents (IDiots) are rather transparently using it to try to slip their deity into places it doesn't need to be is simply because the current batch of IDiots are (or were) also creationists. For now, it is effective to use the usual anti-creationist arguments against IDiots because they will usually defend against such attacks never realizing that they're irrelevant to the ID position. Equating ID with creationism because the IDiots are creationists is basically ad hominem and prevents someone from examining the future potential ID has to not merely masquerade as a science but to actually become one in it's own right.
IDiots have tried to make much of the fact that the identity of the intelligent designer (IDer) is not the focus of ID and, therefore, ID cannot be said to advance any religion. Most people see though this and see with abundant clarity that "IDer" means "My Deity" to the current batch of IDiots. However, ID makes no necessary appeal to the supernatural.
Francis Crick believes in directed panspermia. In short, he thinks aliens seeded the planet with life. Crick is a proponent of intelligent design for this reason. Sure, sure, perhaps there's not much of an experimental difference in asserting life was created by aliens v. asserting it was created by deities. Theoretically one could imagine if we could get a good look at the genomes of these (presumably undesigned) aliens they would be qualitatively different from our (presumably designed) genomes. While it is possible to take issue with the identity of the IDer, one should realize that it's not the core problem of ID and that ID does not require supernatural or unscientific claims... though the IDiot you're debating might make such claims.
The current stumbling block to ID becoming recognized as scientific is that it lacks a coherent standard of evidence against which one can claim some bit of data as evidence for ID. It is, for the moment, completely lacking in the necessary element of falsifiability.
Michael Behe's concept of irreducible complexity is probably the one people are most familiar with due to his popular book Darwin's Black Box. Unfortunately, the reasoning presented in the book is not new... indeed such arguments could be found in reference to objects such as the eye even in Darwin's time. It is ultimately an argument from ignorance. Behe can't figure out how these irreducibly complex (IC) systems could have evolved, thus they couldn't have evolved. It's also been noted that evolutionary algorithms can be expected to remove unnecessary components and therefore produce IC systems. There are a number of other specific and theoretical problems with the argument that IC systems are inexplicable within an evolutionary framework, but they are better covered in other nodes.
William Dembski is the other main player in the attempt to make ID into a valid scientific pursuit. Dembski's complex specified information (CSI) depends heavily on information theory. I have yet to encounter any IDiot that could competently describe or support a argument built around information theory. In my experience, Dembski's work is (mis)used in much the same way that creationists of yore have exploited thermodynamics. Simply demanding a rigorous scientific definition of information at the opening of such discussions will prevent the cameleon-like shifts in meaning which the sophistry depends on. The problem with Dembski's actual work is that his explanatory filter cannot differentiate between the products of a design process (such as evolution) and the products of an intelligent designer. There are some that contend that CSI does not identify design in general and that CSI is a meaningless concept. Again, these specific contentions are better covered in other nodes.
It is my expectation that should a coherent standard of evidence for intelligent design ever come into being we will quickly discover that we are not intelligently designed and ID will be cast aside as a disproven hypothesis by the scientific community. IDiots will, of course, not be affected and will then be deserving of the same ridicule as creationists.
fhayashi,
Hardy-Weinberg Equilibrium gives a list of required conditions for a population
not to evolve. Natural selection occurs when you violate the condition that all members of the population are equally likely to die and reproduce. Sexual selection occurs when you violate the condition that all members of the population are equally likely to reproduce with any other member of the population. Genetic drift occurs when you violate the condition that the population is arbitrarily large enough to reduce the effects of chance to background noise. The other two primary conditions are that no new alleles are produced in (mutation) or introduced to (gene flow) the population.