eagles,
That is a very interesting question. Actually, ID is not shunned by anyone. It is a 150 year old idea, first proposed by William Paley at the beginning of the 1800s in his book called Natural Theology. The book was used for some 60 years or more and Charles Darwin used it as a textbook at Cambridge.
Paley's Design notion was more of a theological one than a scientific one, since there was no scientific theory or any evidence against it until the mid 1800s when fossils were starting to be found and along with the science of geology. Together they pretty much nailed down the notion of Descent with Modification, which is the fact part of Evolution. By Darwin's time, Descent with Modification was pretty much accepted as fact but there were a number of different explanations for how it might occur.
When Darwin provided the mechanism of Random Mutation + Natural Selection it pretty much put the nail in the coffin of Design theory. For the last 150 years now, Design theory has come up with no evidence, it has never explained anything, nor has it made any predictions.
On the other hand, Darwin's theory, which is now combined with genetics and microbiology to form Modern Evolutionary Theory has done nothing but produce evidence, successful explanations and successful predictions for the last 150 years.
Since this is the measure for acceptance of a scientific theory, it is the accepted theory for the diversity of life on the planet. There are some 400 papers published every month in professional journals on evolution with no one publishing anything that refutes it. The various mechanism of Evolution and the pathways and taxonomy is always being modified, but the basic idea has been sound for over 100 years.
What the public believes has no scientific value, except for the fact that it is a tragedy for a nation so advanced in science and technology for its public to be clueless about one of the foundational scientific theories of the last two centuries.
The controversy you might hear about is not scientific, since no one has made any scientific challenges to Evolution in the last 100 years or so. The controversy is religious, political and cultural.
The Discovery Institute, in Seattle, who has published recently on Inteligent Design and is making all the noise about it has an annual budget in the millions of dollars, all supplied by Christian fundamentalists. They do no research, nor do they submit papers to scientific journals. It is a political lobbying firm and all their budget goes into lobbying the public and the federal and state legislative bodies of state boards of education.
Edit; Oh by the way. The Modern Theory of Evolution says nothing about how the first life form came about. It is simply a theory on how live came to be so diverse on the planet. Notions about lightning and mud are most speculation, but it has been observed pleny of times that it is not too hard to create organic molecules. In fact, the spectrum of a number of organic molecules are
seen in space even.