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People who can't abide the fact that I've been criticizing the concept of intelligent design are calling for a debate on the subject. Well, we're having a debate right here in the pages of this newspaper.

I have made the observation that there is no measurable evidence to support the idea that there's an Intelligent Designer behind the origin and complexity of life on Earth. I have yet to see a shred of such evidence.

Notice that I said EVIDENCE. Not opinions. Not hand-waving. Not attacks on Darwin or evolution or my educational background.

Where is the evidence supporting intelligent design? After all, Darwin's ideas on evolution through natural selection have stood test after test for more than 150 years. Darwin showed how organisms evolve over time: Bacteria evolve into more complex cells (such as amoebas), which evolve into multi-celled organisms, which. ... Well, eventually, apes evolve into hominids such as Homo erectus and H. Neandertalis and H. sapiens — us.

This basic idea has been supported by literally mountains of evidence. Fossils of long-dead creatures show, for example, how our modern horse evolved from much smaller creatures, and how today's whales evolved from land-dwelling animals over the course of tens of millions of years.

Biologists have seen cichlid fishes in lakes in Africa evolve into separate species. And of course, as any medical doctor can tell you, those pesky bacteria evolve practically before our eyes to develop resistance to antibiotic drugs.

Evidence. Things you can measure. Tests. Taking an idea and testing it to see if it actually works in the real world.

A couple of letter writers have pointed out that Stanley Miller's experiment, in which organic chemicals were created out of ordinary inorganic materials, is no longer regarded among scientists as highly as it was when Miller originally did his work in the 1950s.

Yeah, right! We know a lot more now than we did in the 1950s.

Miller and his mentor, Nobel laureate Harold C. Urey, put together a mixture of hydrogen, ammonia, methane and water vapor in a flask and then sparked it with an electrical discharge. Within a few days, the mixture had turned into amino acids, the building blocks of proteins. Organic matter produced out of inorganic chemicals: the first stepping stone to the origin of life on Earth.

Miller and Urey thought that the mixture they started out with was pretty much like the Earth's atmosphere nearly 4 billion years ago. Today we know that this was wrong: Earth's early atmosphere did not contain much free hydrogen. But the principle that their experiment proved remains valid: Organic chemicals — the building blocks of life — can arise out of ordinary inorganic materials.

This indicates — but does not yet prove — that life can arise spontaneously, out of non-living chemicals. Ordinary chemistry can do the trick without the need of an Intelligent Designer to stir the pot.

In the 1990s, Dr. Louis J. Allamandola and his colleagues at NASA's Ames Research Center in California also produced organic chemicals, including amino acids, in the kind of ice that makes up comets. In their laboratory they simulated the hard vacuum and near-absolute-zero temperature of deep space and found that simple molecules of frozen water, carbon dioxide, methane, and ammonia will produce amino acids and other organic chemicals.

Far from being a statistical impossibility, or a nearly impossible fluke, the building blocks of life can be produced from ordinary chemistry — even in deep space, where comets roam.

No one has yet produced a living cell, true enough, but that day is coming. A new scientific discipline called "synthetic biology" has arisen over the past few years, and sooner or later its practitioners will produce life in a test tube.

Science progresses. The constant striving for new knowledge, new understanding, leads to new ideas and new capabilities. Before the rise of science, four centuries ago, even the wealthiest and most powerful people on Earth died from diseases such as smallpox and pneumonia and even whooping cough. Most people labored from dawn to dusk the same way they had been doing for thousands of years.

But the rise of science, of an organized and ongoing search for knowledge, changed all that. Today, the average American has more horsepower under the hood of his automobile than the Emperor Nero had in his Roman stables. Today we have medicines and vaccines that have brought most infectious diseases under control, and are moving toward cures for genetic diseases such as diabetes, Parkinson's and cancer.

Contrast this ongoing search for knowledge with the offerings of intelligent design. Instead of striving to find answers, ID states flatly that some things are too complex for us to understand. In place of knowledge, ID binds us to everlasting ignorance.

A few nights ago, I sat up and watched an old horror flick, "The Bride of Frankenstein." Many regard it as the best of the Frankenstein series of movies. This is the one film in which the monster, portrayed by Boris Karloff, speaks. Somewhere in the film, one of the characters warns Dr. Frankenstein, "There are some things that man is not meant to know."

That philosophy of ignorance is fit only for slaves. There may be some things that we will never discover, never understand, but it won't be for lack of trying.

Is life so complex that only an Intelligent Designer could have created it? Or is life the result of quite ordinary chemical reactions, so ordinary that we will find life on other worlds?

Despite the howls of protest from those who support intelligent design, all the available evidence points to the conclusion that we can learn, we can discover, we can understand the universe in which we live.

To throw up our hands and say, "it's too complicated for my poor brain to figure out," is an unwarranted surrender, and a step on the slippery road to despotism.

aples resident Ben Bova is the author of more than 100 books. His latest novel is "Mercury." Dr. Bova's Web site address is www.benbova.net.