IT IS not often that Â鶹´«Ã½ receives letters from readers threatening to sue God, but one recently wrote in asking for compensation for his badly designed back. Disregarding the chutzpah of such a lawsuit, and the difficulties of arranging debt collection in case God lost and failed to pay up, the letter was emblematic of the passions roused by the debate over intelligent design (ID), the creationist challenge to Darwinism.
2005 was the year that ID, which argues that living creatures are too complex to have evolved without the influence of an “intelligent designer”, became a significant political force…
