Thanks for the link! Not getting into demographics is fine by me-- I was simply responding to your broad brush strokes. As for calling me or someone else a creationist, that's okay--- my point wasn't about courtesy but clarity (it's a pretty thinly veiled pretense at any rate, if it's preceded by lines like "I'll grant your wish or ending with "But you wanted to avoid that" after you've said "that":)). Similarly, I brought up Popper and his "naive falsiifcationism" simply because you were employing it. Your Sherlock Holmes example is funny, but it misses the point I was making, which was that while the lack of an explanatory mechanism is a serious absence, a gap in its causal story does not by itself render a research program "unscientific".
Look, don't you think this deal about atheists wanting to be called brights and Darwinists not wanting to be called Darwinists is kind of silly ? When I was growing, up "Darwinist" was fine. Even today, Lynn Margulis (not a Brit) says of herself that "... I greatly admire Darwin's contributions and agree with most of his theoretical analysis and I am a Darwinist ..." I remember when Jesse Jackson decided that black people should be called African-American. As a black man and a black reporter (anyone who's listened to Phil Hendrie knows what I'm talking about!)that seemed dumb to me then and still does. The reason I used "Darwinism" is because "theory of evolution" is too broad. Theories of evolution are thousands of years old-- it's Darwin's theory that's relatively new. If you give me a term that means the same thing as "Darwinist" and isn't too hard to spell, though, I'll use it--- it's not as though I've ever used it as a term of approbrium anyway. Yes, I know I'm arguing with myself-- it's my brain's neural Darwinism afflicting me.
As for a research program, Dembski's own contribution, such as it is, is in probability theory, as I said. I've read other books in the Cambridge series his book was published in and with guys like Richard Jeffery the series is about as high quality as you can get. Another ID research project is, as I understand it, being done at the level of enzymes to determine how sparsely populated islands of a given functional enzyme type are within the greater sea of non-functional polypeptides. The idea is that if they turn out to be sparsely populated, this would serve as a confirmation (not absolute proof) of an instance of hitting the called shot i.e. "specified complexity", while The idea behind Dembski's design filter is to refine it so it doesn't give false positives. In both cases it seems to me legitimate goals are being worked on of the sort a research program should include.
A theory that includes an arbitrary prohibition against investigating obvious and major aspects of the theory is an unscientific theory. We don't have such rules in real science. Answering one scientific question always leads to another. If ID happened to be true, something I rank in likelihood with my winning next Saturday's powerball jackpot, you can bet the next thing we'd try to do is figure out who, why, when, where and how. Trying to forbid prior speculation about the issue is a tacit admission that such speculation will lead to a debate about the supernatural, and thus the theory is constructed using political, not scientific considerations.
The reason I used "Darwinism" is because "theory of evolution" is too broad. Theories of evolution are thousands of years old-- it's Darwin's theory that's relatively new.
If you say 'theory of evolution', nobody will be in the least unclear what you mean. I promise.
Another ID research project is, as I understand it, being done at the level of enzymes to determine how sparsely populated islands of a given functional enzyme type are within the greater sea of non-functional polypeptides. The idea is that if they turn out to be sparsely populated, this would serve as a confirmation (not absolute proof) of an instance of hitting the called shot i.e. "specified complexity", while The idea behind Dembski's design filter is to refine it so it doesn't give false positives.
I know of a lot of research being done on this; not by IDers, though. Angela Gronenborn gave a seminar about it at my institution last year, and in fact there was a recent thread here on evolutionary pathways between proteins. The preliminary data don't look good for ID. Most of Angela's mutant proteins, IIRC, had good stable folds; some in fact had equilibria between two or more folds.
Most math types I know think very little of Dembski's work; it's essentially (according to them) a gussied up version of the old Hoyle argument, through which many very large trucks have been driven.