ID taken to the end

This is a bit simplistic. I'm currently reading a book by Ernst Mayr in which he tells the story of how ToE came about, how it evolved and how the acceptance evolved.In the case of Mendel, it seems his results were indeed published around the time you mention, but it never got much attention until it was "rediscovered" some 40 years later. Only then, it impacted ToE. All that time, scientists were completely in the dark about heredity.MOST aspects actually aren't all that clear-cut. For example Darwin himself still believed in some form of "soft" heredity, neo-Lamarckism. Weismann was the first to really stress that natural selection could account for all examples that were given in favour of inheritance of acquired properties, and better also. Mayr also argues that it would be completely wrong to see ToE as one monolithic theory. Common descent, descent with modification, natural selection and other aspects (don't have the book at hand here) can be, and were, considered seperately.This is also reflected in the different degrees of confidence that Darwin himself had in parts of his theory, and in how the different aspects were accepted or rejected by different people or through history.

I still fail to see where the ID hypothesis leads to. Really, I guess I just don't understand how proposing an "intelligent designer" can be considered a satisfying answer. It's the type of answer that fits everything. Why not simply claim that we "don't know yet"? Looks like a much safer bet, seeing how some of the previously "irreducibly complex" structures have already been explained in the mean time. You simply look silly each time a naturalistic explanation is given for an example you brought up to illustrate that there was a "designer" at work. How many of those claims have to be eliminated before it becomes clear that "ID" is just a silly placeholder for the "as yet unexplained"?Like I said before: it is no use to invoke something like an intelligent extraterrestrial species as our "engineers", because even if that were true you would have to come up with an explanation for THEIR origins. And if that turns out to be another intelligent species, you'll have to repeat the same exercise again. And again, and again, and again... Until you either find a naturalistic explanation (which you could have applied rightaway to life on earth to begin with), or invoke ... "God".As to the black box analogy, I've given that some thinking; if we see the different layers of knowledge as consecutive "black boxes" inside other "black boxes", then proposing ID seems to be analogeous to opening a "black box", and finding two "black boxes" that are connected. And next deciding to forget about one of them and only trying to open the other. The one you decide to neglect would then stand for the "intelligence" of the designer. It would absolutely make no sense to try to figure out the contents of the other box on its own, because it is tied to the "intelligence" black box. A seperate interpretation of the other black box would always be distorted or disjointed. Maybe it's even impossible to just peek inside, if you haven't first figured out the "intelligence" box.