The concept of intelligent design in every form that I’ve run across contains as a basic premise, the benevolence of the "Intelligence" behind the design. Please don’t misunderstand; I'm not faulting proponents of ID for this. Any other ID scenario involving a Supreme Being is frankly too depressing to contemplate. However the task of reconciling the idea of a munificent Designer with the reality of life is is not without a few hurdles.
This is easier to illustrate with an extreme example that everybody is familiar with: Jehovah’s Witnesses and a few other Christian groups not only don’t like the idea of cute little Thompson’s Gazelles getting chased down, torn apart and eaten by hungry Cheetahs, they feel this violates the idea of a loving God at a very basic level.
In order to explain the fact that this actually does happen, they have combined the Augustinean concept of deviation from original purpose with a very literal reading of Genesis 1:30, declaring that all animals were originally created as vegetarians and that the only reason that predators exist today is because, "Existing features were put to a different use from what was originally purposed." (cf. Awake! 1/8/83 p. 28)
For JW's, this gets rid of the ugly visual created by predation among higher mammals, true, but it’s ultimately a complete repudiation of the ID argument. One of many problems at work here is that the decomposition chain is an intrinsic part of every cycle in any ecosystem and scavengers and other detrivores are an indispensable part of it. Since eating dead bodies is certainly not vegetarianism, JW's must somehow account for this. If outside intelligence did not design the decomposition chain, than what did? Did it evolve after all?
Problems with the idea of deviation from original purpose become even more apparent when the "deviation" involves interaction between two or more organisms. For example, if pollination of the carrion flower was not intended to be carried out by the blow-fly, then why does it give off the smell of decaying meat? For that matter, why does the blow-fly associate the small of decaying meat with food in the first place?
Many proponents of ID are more studied in their approach and avoid such obvious pitfalls in their reasoning. I used this example only to illustrate a "Catch-22" sort of problem, which I believe persists in even the most sophisticated ID argument.
I think an example of this can be seen in the life-cycle of the protozoan responsible for malaria. Plasmodium falciparum is a very nasty little creature that reproduces both sexually and asexually, the former in mosquitoes and the latter in humans.
When a female Anopheline mosquito bites an infected victim, it consumes both male and female malarial gametocytes in the victim’s blood. Within the mosquito’s midgut, the male gametocyte undergoes a nuclear division, producing eight flagellated microgametes which fertilize the female macrogamete. The resulting ookinete traverses the mosquito gut wall, forming an oocyst on the outside of the organ. After a few hours, the oocyst ruptures, releasing hundreds of sporozoites into the mosquito body cavity where they migrate to the mosquito salivary gland.
Infection in humans begins with the bite of the infected mosquito. The sporozoites released from the salivary glands of the mosquito enter the bloodstream and invade liver cells. (Hepatocytes) During the next 14 days these parasites differentiate and undergo asexual multiplication resulting in tens of thousands of merozoites which then burst from the infected hepatocyte, into the blood stream. These merozoites now invade red blood cells (erythrocytes) and undergo an additional round of multiplication producing more merozoites. Some of these go on to invade additional erythrocytes and while others now differentiate into the sexual forms, male and female gametocytes. These gametocytes will be taken up by the next female Anopheline mosquito that bites.
This is a complicated process involving two distinct synchronous vectors. Until recently, epidemiologists have been unable to fully explain why malaria spreads with such alarming efficiency. But it has recently been discovered that P. falciparum facilitates its spread by actually making its human victims more attractive to mosquitoes.
Working in Kenya, Jacob Koella, an evolutionary biologist at Imperial College London, set up the following experiment. Three tents were arranged in a triangle and connected to a central chamber housing 100 uninfected mosquitoes. In each tent was a person from one of three groups. The first group was infected and carried gametocytes, the transmissible, reproductive stage of the parasite. The second group was infected, but had no gametocytes. The third group was uninfected.
Air from all three tents was blown into the mosquito chamber and the insects were allowed to fly into the tent of their choosing. Twice as many mosquitoes consistently chose the tent housing the first group –the group where the parasite was ready to jump to its mosquito vector. This story was originally published in the open access journal PLoS Biology and has been picked up in several other journals, including Medical News Today.
As with the first example involving the JW dislike of predation and their attempts to explain it away, the problem here should be obvious. Exactly what enabled a vicious little parasite to manipulate human body chemistry so as to alter the biting behavior of mosquitoes when it is ready for a new host? For that matter, why do mosquitoes have the desire to bite warm-blooded creatures in the first place? If all this was designed, it's certainly not the product of a nice designer, yet attempts to explain away the malicious "Cleverness" inherent in the process via natural forces amounts to an embracement of evolution with open arms.