 A Challenge to Proponents of Intelligent Design Since the Intelligent Design movement is dedicated to the search for intentional design of living things, I think it's time to give it a little test. Can anyone out there locate a gene that is unambiguously designed? Here's my challenge. Give me the name of a gene in any animal or plant that you think is designed. No fair cheating, let's stick to sequences found in nature, not transgenics, and only organisms we have some sequencing data on. I would prefer human, mouse, rat, dog, cow, mosquito, fruit fly, rice, cress, or fish. I will then test your gene using homology and some other tools for two things, homology and specific or unique function. For the purposes of our test, let's consider homology defined as 20% protein identity over more than 100 amino acids. That's 1 out of 20 amino acids at each position, or 0.05 probability raised to at least a power of 20, or less than 1 in 1 times 10 raised to the power of 28, chance of being a coincidence. That's a pretty low probability. We'll test that your protein is specific for a certain function with OMIM database. We don't want some protein that has used lots of ways, or it can't be part of an irreducibly complex structure. This shouldn't take you long. Feel free to throw out guesses. Leave the gene name in the comments and I'll post the results when I can. If we find a winner, it will be exciting and interesting.