This has all been said before but I'll bring it up one more time in case the Mayans were right and this is the last year.

IMO, this is a critical point in the ID argument that IDists have never adequately addressed.

Creationists seem to be under the impression that the whole origin of life's diversity issue can be simplified to a simple dichotomy: Evolution versus Intelligent Design. Therefore any evidence against evolution must be considered evidence for ID. Makes no sense.

Science is fundamentally about mechanisms, about how things happen. Mechanisms are really the only things that can be empirically tested, which is what science is all about. One hypothesizes that A becomes Z by going through a particular process. To test this, one makes predictions about what must happen if that process actually occurs.

Evolution is a mechanism. It describes how A becomes Z. It is empirically testable. In contrast, Intelligent Design is not a mechanistic proposal. Apples and oranges.

So if scientists disprove some aspects of current evolutionary theory it doesn't mean squat to ID. Suppose Behe's wildest dream comes true and the science community admits that mutations + natural selection can't produce complexity. Will there be a mass conversion to ID? Nope. The science community will just start paying more attention to stuff like emergent qualities and chaos theory or whatever other "mechanistic" alternatives come to mind. Or they might just say we have no idea what is going on.

But they won't convert to Behe-ism because ID doesn't provide a mechanistic alternative to evolution. Hence it is not an alternative to evolution. This is why ID has no impact on scientific research.

The only time scientists care about Behe or ID is when science education is threatened.