VI. Conclusion

In this article, I have proposed a method for the detection of intelligent design. Applying that method to the Venter 'watermarks' in their synthetic genome, the method successfully identifies the watermarks as highly likely to require ID. The same method applied to protein domains, average proteins, and the minimal genome, also indicates that ID is required for even the simplest life form. If life is the product of natural selection and an extremely complex fitness landscape, then we can conclude that it is extremely likely that intelligent design was required to configure the fitness function. Whether there actually is such an impressive fitness function encoded in nature is outside the scope of this discussion. I have not proved that intelligent design was required for biological life.

Instead, I have shown that given intelligent design is easily capable of generating functional information on the level of what is required for biological life, and given that the functional information required for biological life is far beyond what we could reasonably expect nature to generate, intelligent design is the most probable explanation, by many orders of magnitude, for biological life. Intelligent design would also be the most probable explanation for any fitness function operative in natural selection that could successfully locate the folding proteins required for life.

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Intelligent Design: Did Biological Life Require It?