According to Teleology, each organism is like a rifle bullet fired straight at a mark; according to Darwin, organisms are like grapeshot of which one hits something and the rest fall wide.
John Pieret, of Thoughts in a Haystack, has a nice further discussion of this excellent essay of Huxley's, doing what I didn't have the energy to do. Now that he has linked here and I back to him, expect the Internet to roll up in a recursive black hole...
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For some reason I think of survival as the default, and "selection" as the grim reaper - the inverse of what is usually meant by selection. That might give a slightly different meaning to "adaptation" as well.
The essay from Huxley to which you link could be, without modification, put in the hands of an inteligent designer as an adequate refutation of their position. What goes around comes around!
All of us survivors must have come from a straight line of descent, it is the position of the mark - the survival window at any point in time - that is the variable factor.
I like to imagine each bit of grapeshot thinking of itself as the straight-and-true ideal, which the other grapeshot is failing to meet.
Thony C's right, and on a cosmic scale too perhaps. We know that there is at least one Universe that can support intelligent life, and we know of no reason why there should not be many more. Quite the converse, since the apparently arbitrary nature of the cosmic constants would make more sense if this Universe were just one of a Multiverse (with cosmic variables).
So even if we did see lots of prima facie evidence for intelligent design in this Universe - if the ID people were that successful, as seems unlikely but as they hope - that would really be if anything only evidence that intelligent aliens would probably be few and far between, in this Universe. (Of course, the funny thing about the ID people is how they obsess about quite unexceptional coincidences if they can read into them messages from their favourite storybooks.)