It seems to me that the single most important prediction of Darwinism is that the fossil record would show clear and convincing evidence of the gradual change of one species into another. That is to say that a large number of transitional forms, each varying from the previous form only slightly, yet clearly linking two species would be found. Further, occurrences of this type would be found a number of times.

Darwin himself alluded to the other prediction of Darwinism that I see. It is a prediction of what will not be found, rather that what will. Darwinism requires, as I understand it, that no structure in the makeup of a living thing can be irreducibly complex. That is, not structure can be of such a nature that it could not have arisen by minute, incremental changes from one or more simpler structures. Or, to put it in the positive, all structures within the makeup of a living thing must be capable of having incrementally developed from one or more simpler structures.

Now, Though my knowledge of it is limited, I don’t think ID predicts either of these.

You stepped in it earlier, and now you’re wiping your shoe on your trouser leg. Sow what if ID “doesn’t say anything about common descent”? This is supposed to be about predictions of “Darwinism”, not about ID.

Even YEC’s have no trouble with change over time.

I should say not! YECs must believe, for instance, that llamas and camels diverged (evolved?) into their present forms from a common ancestor in less than ~10000 years, since the two species can be cross-bred and therefore must be the same “kind.”

Qetzal, your prediction is in an intriguing one, but it still only follows from common descent, not from the stronger hypothesis I posited above.

No, because natural selection and the other undirected processes have no way to create chimeras. A designer could create chimeras (as we humans already do, to a limited extent).

You can certainly argue that a designer is not obligated to create chimeras, and might choose not to. But neither ID nor common descent predict the absence of chimeras.

If you want a prediction that gets closer to the heart of the undirected vs. directed question, consider this. Evolution predicts that specific mutant and new genes do not arise in anticipation that they will be useful at a later date. Which is what we see, as best we can currently test this.

ID doesn’t predict that.

Evolution also predicts that regions of DNA that do not directly influence fitness will mutate faster than regions of DNA to do affect fitness. Again, that’s what we see.

ID certainly doesn’t predict that.

Here again, you can argue that a putative designer could choose to work in these ways. But there’s no way that ID actually predicts this.

“The origin of life has occured solely by undirected processes such as natural selection.”

Yeah, and water runs downhill, entirely *undirected* by the hill, gravity or any other damn thing that might interfere with it… This is why ID proponents are fools. They start with a *assuption* that there *needs* to be a designer, then state that evolution is undirected, then finally insist that you have to replace the director with some unspecified force or entitiy who pushes every molecule of the water down hill, presumably making sure it *fits* the shape of the fracking hill and doesn’t do something weird like falling up. The universe is orders of magnitude more complex than the earth and a single beach is orders of magnitude more complex than the genetic material an *any* cell. Why the @%@$@#$ can’t an already complex system produce something “less” complex than itself, but still more complex than some limited minds are willing and able to comprehend? And more to the point, “HOW EXACTLY”, is a process that helps those things better fit that complex environment, by adapting to “fit” its shape, “unguided”? More to the point, why do you need anything extra to make sure it happens at all, beyond the shape and structure of the “existing” environment?

Oh, and I really love the suggestion made about trying to find similar genetic features between “unrelated” species. Given that evolution says “all” life on the earth is related, where they hell are you planning to find such a thing? Alpha Centauri maybe?

Try, I don’t know, actually reading literature on the subject that comes from the people that “do” understand it, instead of the list of dipsticks at DI who will happilly look at a stack of 200 articles on some specific minor subject in evolution and go, “Bah! That doesn’t really exists and says nothing useful!”

Those are good predictions but they don’t follow directly from the very limited proposition in my post. Even YEC’s have no trouble with change over time. Even YEC’s know that organs sometimes loose their functionality.

IDers certainly have no trouble with those concepts. The ID theory also doesn’t have anything to say about common descent, so any predictions from common descent are totally irrelevant.

According to Occam’s razor we should always hold the most modest hypothesis we can. If there are no predictions from the above proposition by itself, there is no reason to hold it and we should just hold a more modest proposition (say common descent).

We have seen evolution in action in a number of cases (mostly in small organisms like vira and bacteria, but also on larger organisms), and we will continue to see this.

And ‘common descent’ is evolution (though not everything that evolution is), and evolution makes precise predictions related to this. ID takes no official position on the subject, and thus doesn’t make predicitions on the subject. Thus you can’t claim that predictions related to ‘common descent’ are somehow not valid - they are fundamentally grounded in evolution.

A different prediction, which goes somewhat against the whole concept of intelligent design. We’ll find organs that have changed their functionality over time.
Oh, sorry, that’s not a prediction…. Well, we’ll continue to find this to be the case.

Take the pangolin. It looks superficially chimeric. It’s clearly a mammal, but it has scales rather like a reptile. If you analyze its DNA, evolution predicts you will not find a set of genes involved in scale development that are of reptilian origin.

ID certainly does not predict that. There’s nothing preventing a putative designer from mixing reptilian and mammalian genes to make a new species. In fact, the only actual intelligent designer we know of does exactly that. Here, of course, I’m talking about us. We are the only proven example of a designer making chimeras (e.g. bacteria that produce human insulin).

I repeat that this is not the case. ID does not predict common descent, it simply takes no official position on it, and individual ID proponents may or may not accept varying degrees of common descent. When ID proponents (such as Behe) accept common descent, they do so based on evolutionary theory, not on ID.