>> I've seen a lot of arguments for and against whether ID should be taught
>> in schools alongside evolution. For me, these all miss the main point:
>> ID is not a scientific theory. It may or may not be correct, but it's
>> not testable. Because it doesn't /predict/ anything.
>
> Actually, it does. It predicts, among other things, that the genetic
> code for organisms may have features of no present use, but which may be
> of use by descendant creatures. An intelligent designer, especially one
> of the intellect required to design a eukaryotic cell, would have some
> capacity for anticipating future changes to the environment and can
> front-load the genetic code in preparation for this.

ID asserts that "life was designed by an intelligent, concious entity". 
That's all it says.

Now, if you mean "life was designed by an intelligent, concious entity 
AT THE START OF EARTH'S HISTORY", then you start to be able to make some 
predictions.

The first prediction is that the genome of every creature that has ever 
existed and will ever exist must have been somehow encoded into the very 
first lifeform(s) that the designer seeded the planet with.

By a trivial pigeon-hole argument this is laughably impossible.

It also pre-supposes that the designer knew exactly what habitats would 
exist in 4 billion years' time, which is also absurdly impossible.

(The best human scientists, equipped with mountains of measurement data, 
cannot even predict what the weather will do in 5 days' time, never mind 
what it will do over geological time. And you're suggesting that the 
designer /could/ predict all of this with /no measurement data at all/? 
I think not.)

To see how severe the problem is, consider the video I watched the other 
day. D. Attenborough visited an ancient lava flow in New Zealand. In one 
place, it had cut off an area of forest about 300 yards across. And in 
this one tiny island of green surrounded by barren rock, there lives an 
entire ecosystem of plants and animals. There are species of fruit flies 
there that live in this 300 square yard patch of ground, and live 
nowhere else on the face of the Earth.

You seriously expect me to believe that some designer 4 billion years 
ago could have predicted that the lava flow would move in this exact 
direction to leave this specific patch of green free for colonisation? 
Pull the other one, it's got bells on.

> Be that as it may, I am against the teaching of life's origins on the
> public dime, because it is a matter of public debate, and is therefore
> incompatible with the principles that underlie a free society.

Well, that's a nice idea, but do we not teach children about World War 
II, because some lunatic claims that it didn't happen? Do we not tell 
them that the world is round, because a few lone idiots claim that it's 
flat?

Isn't part of the job of education to get the facts straight, so that 
kids know what to believe?

Now, that's not always possible of course. There are cases where we 
really aren't sure what the facts actually are. And IMHO that is a 
useful lesson too. If you're talking about the /origin/ of life on 
Earth, nobody has really conclusively figured that out yet. There's a 
bunch of plausible theories, but nobody is really anywhere near sure. 
But if you're talking about the /evolution/ of life... apart from a few 
lone crackpots, everybody unanimously agrees on the matter. So that's 
what we should teach.

Personally, I think they /should/ teach ID in schools. As an example of 
how to tell the difference between scientific fact and crude falsehood. 
(Apparently some people can't do this yet...)

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