If you've ever read a copy of
Science or
Nature, you will notice that the papers they publish have long lists of contributors and participants. Science, especially biological science, is such a complex discipline that it takes four or five minds to hold everything there is to know about even the simplest details of taxonomy, or immune response, or the evolutionary emergence of vision. You'll see the phrase "a team led by," but the leader rarely takes more than half the credit for the discovery. It takes
teams of scientists all working the right direction to have enough ideas, and enough insight to make those ideas meaningful, to conduct useful research.
I once observed that one of the interesting distinctions in a bookstore is that between the "science" and "religion" sections: the science section is more or less harmonious; other than a few mis-shelved products, all of the books agree with one another: chemists agree on the underlying physics that makes chemistry meaningful; biologists agree on the underlying chemistry that makes biology work; zoologists agree on the common descent illustrated by biology to make their own output meaningful. In contrast, in the religion section, there is no agreement: thousands of books with chapters on the meaning of life, the origins of morality, the purpose of existence, and so forth, and they not only disagree with one another, but they do so with surprising vehemence.
Both of these issues are highlighted in the books published by the Intelligent Design movement. Wells's
Icons of Evolution and Behe's
Darwin's Black Box disagree on just about everything. Dembski's
The Design Revolution has little in common with Wells. Most of the books in ID don't even purport to do science: they purport to uncover "problems" in evolutionary biology, most of which aren't really problems and the rest of which are avenues of fruitful naturalistic research. These are all "researchers" going off on their own wild goose chases, ignoring everyone else's goose in the process.
But they're also all one-man shows. There's no research team, no corrective influence of other minds going "No, don't write that, there's no research to back that up," no group dynamic leading to meaningful output. Every single book that the ID people claim with "demolish Darwinism" is a single jeremiad from a single mind, without collaboration or cooperation from others.
Cdesign Proponentsist writers are stuck in the 1950s idea of a single discoverer landing on a key piece of information so critical to discourse that he simply must let it out. ID writers claim that they have to "go around" the mainstream science institutions because science is blind to their discovery, but that's nonsense: if what they had to say was compelling and evidentiary, it would converge with all the knowledge we have already.
And it would be useful.