ID is worthless. Surprised?

Rosenhouse, of EVOLUTIONBLOG, gives a great example of the sheer ridiculousness of Intelligent Design.

ID folks make numerous assertions said to represent scientific challenges to conventional evolutionary theory. These claims are uniformly wrong, which is one of the reasons scientists generally ignore them.

But ID folks also claim that adopting a design perspective could lead to great progress in science, if only scientists would take off their materialist blinders. There is an acid test for all such claims: Go discover something! Writers are fond of saying “Show, don't tell,” and that adage applies very well here. If your perspective is so useful, then prove it by discovering something the conventional methods had overlooked.

Every once in a while an ID proponent claims to have done such a thing, but such claims invariably crumble after even the briefest examination. So I read with interest this post from ID hack and Dembski lackey Denyse O'Leary. It's title: Nine Predictions, if Intelligent Design is True.

Golly! That's a lot of predictions. Now, typically when scientists talk about a prediction of a theory, they are talking about something they can use to guide their research. Give a paleontologist a region of the world and rocks of a particular age, and they can tell you with considerable precision what sorts of creatures you ought to find in the fossils. We saw a dramatic example of this in 2006 with the discovery of Tiktaalik. Paleontologists were searching for a fossil with certain characteristics, and they had a good idea of where to look for the best chance of finding one as the result of evolutionary thinking. That is just one example. It is not difficult to come up with many more.

Can ID do anything like that? Of course not. If it could, it would have taken over as the dominant paradigm in biology long ago. This hasn't stopped various ID folks from trying to pretend otherwise. Let's have a look at O'Leary's efforts.

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