In this letter he raised the claim that nature provides evidence for intelligent design and criticizes evolutionary biologists for being unable to recognize the design. The letter reads: "Any system of thought that denies or seeks to explain away the overwhelming evidence for design in biology is ideology, not science." and "Scientific theories that try to explain away the appearance of design as the result of 'chance and necessity' are not scientific at all, but β¦ an abdication of human intelligence." Thereby, the Cardinal rejects the concept of evolution driven by random variation and selection, apostrophized as "chance and necessity" in the Neo-Darwinian spirit. The two quoted sentences are remarkable not only because the Cardinal aims at the recognition of intelligent design in nature but also because he accuses evolutionary biologists of adhering to an ideology. Almost all scientists who answered the letter reacted sharply because they felt that science has its own well-established rules for the dialog of the researcher with nature, and this dialog so far has not led to the necessity to assume a plan or a designer for understanding the evolution of the biosphere. The reaction of the nonscientific public, however, was ambiguous: Some answers were liberal and said: "Let the scientists do their job and define what science is about, and accordingly the Cardinal should care about belief and religion." An appreciable fraction of letters to newspapers in response to the letter in the New York Times, however, welcomed the Cardinal's position because they found that time has come to regulate scientific thought. Without digging into the deeper reasons of the somewhat burdened relation between science and laymen in the public, it seems in place to address some facts concerning the issues on which the most frequently invoked arguments for design are built. In the following six paragraphs an attempt is made to present these facts in the light of biology of today, which is more than 50 years after the formulation of the synthetic or Neo-Darwinian theory of evolution.
PROBABILITY ARGUMENTS IN FAVOR OF DESIGN ARE FUTILE
An argument often raised against evolution by variation and selection is the low probability to obtain one particular biomolecule or one organism (see, e.g., Eugene Wigner ). We present it here in a simplifying caricature: In order to find one particular genome of chain length one million nucleotides, the number of trials required to hit the target in a random search with probability one is 4 1,000,000 Ο· 10 600,000 . Although the mean path length would be smaller than a path visiting all sequences, the number is so incredibly