Francisco J. Ayala: UCI Departments of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology and Philosophy

Darwin is deservedly given credit for the theory of biological evolution. He accumulated evidence demonstrating that organisms evolve and diversify through time. Most important, however, is that he discovered natural selection, the process that accounts for the adaptive organization of organisms and their features; that is, their “design.” But the design of organisms is not intelligent, as it would be expected from an engineer, but imperfect and worse: the defects, dysfunctions, oddities, waste-and even cruelty and sadism if judged by human values-that pervade the living world are incompatible with their being the outcome of an intelligent designer, unless this designer would also be intentionally deceitful and malevolent.