The Death Knell for ID?

Possible IDiot responses:* "Yes, but this isn't an example of something else entirely which we also claim to be impossible, a claim refuted by different examples which, however, aren't examples of a third thing which we won't define clearly enough for you to find out whether they are or not."* "This observation was made on organisms with such a short generation time that it was possible to make the observation. Therefore, like all such observations, it doesn't count."* "That isn't irreducibly complex, because it evolved."* "That isn't evolution, because it was an experiment done by a scientist in a laboratory, and is therefore an example of intelligent design. Of course, when we are talking out of the other side of our stupid faces, we claim that nothing counts as scientific knowledge unless it is the result of an experiment done by a scientist in a laboratory, because we are fucking morons."* A resounding silence in which, in the far distance, one can here Behe's books being reprinted without emendation.

That would basically be response #1, with the addition of an explicit lie about your opponents --- which does not, I might add, make response #1 any smarter.

This would remove any possibility of you offering any substantive critique of my posts --- if such a possibility existed in the first place. But if you feel that you have nothing to lose, then who am I to argue?

However, it is true that removing one part of the system destroys its function (using OmpF). Now the IDists' arguments about IC rest on the assumption that in such a case each of the parts separately is useless, and so the system cannot have been assembled a bit at a time by natural selection causing the parts to accumulate, because natural selection would not have acted on the parts.The fact that each mutation was adaptive is just what shows that they were wrong. The evolutionist case against Behe is not that such combinations of mutations can with reasonable probability arise all at once by chance, but that the series of changes leading to the final system can be produced by a series of steps each of which is adaptive even though it does not produce the final system having the final function. This experiment shows a case of that happening.So this part of your post seems completely ass-backwards: No, that would have been a problem for the evolutionists. They would be left with no known mechanism to explain why this pathway is followed, and followed repeatedly, in reruns of the experiment, since this could not be explained by chance (too many long shots coming up) or by the cumulative effect of natural selection (which would not, by hypothesis, act).Meanwhile Behe could have gone around saying that this was the first observed instance of his invisible designer magically tampering with genomes to produce an IC system.The actual observation is therefore a blow against ID precisely because the system evolved by completely normal Darwinian processes, as evolutionists claim that such systems evolve.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

Perhaps they could acknowledge this fact more loudly and publicly. Or ... at all? Where did they say this? Is a new edition of Darwin's Black Box going to come out consisting exclusively of the words: "I was wrong"?

Evolution is a scientific endeavor, and could only be killed by scientists; ID was a political maneuver, and since its whole purpose was to provide a cover for creationism sufficiently opaque that it could be smuggled past a judge, the fact that it failed in this purpose does seem to kinda wrap it up for ID.And may I wish you guys the very best of luck with your next attempt to rebrand the same ol' crap.

"Speling"? Are you doing this deliberately?As to what it is with "us guys", I guess we just like being right about things. That's why we do it so often.You should try it yourself. I don't mean, heaven forbid, that you should be right about important things, such as biology. But if you managed to acquire a superficial veneer of competence, even intelligence, then it might take people longer to figure out that you are fundamentally a bleedin' idiot. If you're not prepared to back up any of your own nonsense, that's fine by me.