11.11.05
Testing ID?
Panda’s Thumb skewers testability/falsifiability fantasies of Behe (from his testimony at Dover Trial).
In fact, intelligent design is open to direct experimental rebuttal. Here is a thought experiment that makes the point clear. In Darwin’s Black Box, I claimed that the bacterial flagellum was irreducibly complex and so required deliberate intelligent design. The flip side of this claim is that the flagellum can’t be produced by natural selection acting on random mutation, or any other unintelligent process.
To falsify such a claim, a scientist could go into the laboratory, place a bacterial species lacking a flagellum under some selective pressure, for mobility, say, grow it for 10,000 generations, and see if a flagellum, or any equally complex system, was produced. If that happened, my claims would be neatly disproven.
The interesting thing here is that the same experiment could be promoted by a Darwinist, with the same or similar objections.
Very generally, therefore, Behe is right, but… In fact, evolution is a series of unique incidents, a history, and it is questionable if causal replication is meaningful at all, except in special instances.