It seems to me that the basic idea ID has, namely to try to come up with a method for identifying things that couldn't have evolved in order to identify ID, is an interesting one.
In the thread:
"Compare and Contrast ID and SETI", a parallell to the work done by SETI is made... and in some ways it is a good one (and in others not so much).
SETI, like ID works by the method of exclusion. They look for signals that they believe could not have been created by natural phenomena. This is also what IDists want to do with species found on earth.
SETI, when met with a natural phenomena that aptly explains a signal as well as (or better than) the explanation of an intelligent cause, of course decides to pick the natural phenomena as a more likely explanation and moves on to the next signal. For IDists what would be needed in order to follow SETI's lead, would be to find tools that detect unevolvability...
But IDists use no such tools. Concepts like Irreducible Complexity and Complex Specified Information have been found wanting.
It is interesting, however, to note that there
does seem to exist a tool that works in detecting unevolvability, yet IDists do not use it.
What is this tool I'm talking about? Well... in evolutionary biology, analysing the DNA of a species allows us to see where it fits in the nested hierarchy of species (NHoS for short), and therefore where it fits in the evolutionary process. This (and other methods of building the NHoS, and their unlikely convergence to the same NHoS) is often used as evidence for evolution in EVC type debates because there is no known reason, except for evolution, as to why you should be able to do this.
If ID was reality, shouldn't we be able to find species that don't fit into the nested hierarchy of species? Why would the "Intelligent Agent" need to make species that fit into the NHoS? Shouldn't
this be where IDists look? Shouldn't this be the way to find unevolvability?
Now... It seems that most IDists of today chose to look for ID, not in individual species, but rather in subsystems (like for instance blood clotting).
So I guess this becomes a two parter. One is a question for IDists, and the other for people accepting the validity of evolutionary theory. Here, I cannot think of an analogous method for detecting unevolvability.
ID QuestionWhy don't IDists try to detect design by finding species that don't fit into the nested hierarchy of species? *
TOE QuestionDoes anyone on the evolution side of things, more well read on biology than me, know of a method that can find where in the scheme of evolutionary history subsystems fit in, perhaps a way analogous to the NHoS method I suggested?
*
Behe, and peope like him, that accept most of Common Descent might not find this tool useful, but since there are other IDists, not so willing to accept Common Descent I still think the question is interesting.
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