We all know that intelligent design is bad science, it it turns out that it’s bad design too (via Kottke):

In 1802, the English philosopher William Paley, in a kind of predecessor to ID, famously used the case of coming across a rock and a watch in a field. Unlike the rock, the watch consists of the complex interplay of a number of moving parts, each of which is required to make it function. “The inference is inevitable,” said Paley. “The watch must have a maker.”
. . .
Let’s say that instead of a watch in that field, we take the example of an observer coming across an iPod at a trade show. It is a sleek, well-crafted device that has a clever interface and seems to hold thousands of songs. The observer is curious: How could this small object perform these miraculous tasks? He would like to pry it open and figure it out, but there is just something so compelling about the smooth white exterior. It just seems too perfect to disturb, to interrogate. Its microchip architecture is just too complex.
. . .
In the real world, design is Darwinian. To consider the iPod, it did not spring fully formed from the mind of a powerful Designer, but rather it represents one distinct point on a long evolutionary timeline. We would have to go back at least as far as the introduction of recorded music, then trace the increasing portability of that music, through car radios and miniaturized transistor radios after World War II. We would then have to move from the transistor radio with single earpiece to the stereo cassette Walkman, which gave the user the opportunity to listen to what they wanted, when they wanted, in a hermetically sealed mobile environment.

The Walkman, and later the Discman (for tapes were made extinct), laid the social groundwork for the iPod: the idea — and it was a radical one — that it was acceptable to walk around encased in one own’s music. And before the iPod, of course, there were any number of MP3 players (the latest evolutionary medium), each of which were severely limited by their capacity or clunky controls. In their fossilized remains we can see how the iPod came into being, the ideal melding of what was then the most advanced hard drive and an elegant, almost “natural” interface — topped off by styling that was rather divine.

B-b-b-but if I can’t understand it, then it must be the work of god.