That's fair. But at the same time you're not detecting "non-design," either. All you're doing is detecting an anomaly. The scientific question is how to explain the anomaly.
The problem is, this happens naturally, by virus/plasmid translocation of genes....
Sure. And it also happens by design.
As a matter of fact, virus translocation is one of the techniques used by genetic engineers to insert foreign genetic material into other genes. The question for a scientist would be, how did the same "very rare event" propagate into various different strains of bacteria and yeast?
You've proposed one hypothesis -- a sequence of repeated naturalistic events that could (very rarely) cause bacteria and yeast to produce human insulin.
And there's another hypothesis: that somebody put the genetic material into these wee beasties to cause them to produce human insulin.
And thus we're left with valid and competing hypotheses.
The question faced by the scientist would be: which of these valid hypothesis is the best explanation for what we can observe?
So yours is not a useful test for ID. Sorry.
Oh? You think the "naturalistic" and "human-caused" hypotheses are equally likely? Leaving aside the fact that it happens to be correct, "human-caused" is in this case a far more plausible explanation than "occurred naturally." An insistence on finding a "naturalistic cause" in this case would be bad science.
But if we do accept your statement, then logic dictates that it's also not a useful test for a "naturalistic causes" explanation. In essence, you're removing this example from the purview of scientific inquiry. Seems a bit extreme, no?
Sure, if that happened (and the bacteria and yeast wern't themselves direct descendants of each other) that would be very weird. But that's one entirely hypothetical and very limited way a postulated unknown being might have monkeyed with the genome. It turns out, at the moment, there are literally thousands of researchers running different algorithms on the genome databases, looking for weird stuff. When they come up with weird stuff, and they will, that will be the time to look at it and decide if its compatible with evolution. What you want to do is, without evidence that there is any anomaly to look for, propose that we go screen in some way for one particular anomaly. Not a very efficient way to do things.
And thus we're left with valid and competing hypotheses.
We could say that right now. We know hundreds of examples of horizontal gene transfer. For any instance of horizontal gene transfer -- or for that matter any other phenomenon, we also mutate organisms, why shouldn't the designer have done that? - we could propose as an alternative hypothesis 'godidit' (or 'the designer did it' ).
The question faced by the scientist would be: which of these valid hypothesis is the best explanation for what we can observe?
Agreed. And we answer that question every time we discover something new.
Oh? You think the "naturalistic" and "human-caused" hypotheses are equally likely? Leaving aside the fact that it happens to be correct, "human-caused" is in this case a far more plausible explanation than "occurred naturally." An insistence on finding a "naturalistic cause" in this case would be bad science.
No. If there's evidence the change occurred, say, 50,000 years ago, or 2 billion years, the 'human-caused' is highly implausible. If the change occured recently, and the gene implanted looks like it was useful for something, the human-caused hypothesis is plausible. But note that I'm incorporating two things I know about humans - that we haven't been doing genetic engineering for very long, and that we tend to engineer useful things.