That's a quibble. The significant thing is that all the evidence supports the theory. There's just no way of avoiding that.
My personal OPINON is that Evolution is a part of Intelligent Design. I don't personally think Evolution could ever effectively argue against Intelligent Design (assuming it would even want to) unless it could fill all those gaps though.
If there is some designer behind evolution, he does his work in such a way that there's no trace of his activities. This designer operates no differently than if he didn't exist. So his existence makes no difference regarding the evidence we are given to examine. The evidence certainly seems to support evolution theory. The designer, if there is one, seems to be pure philosophical surplusage. If the gaps were all filled (they never could be), ID advocates would merely claim that the designer did a really neat job. As I said earlier, there is no way to disprove ID. That's why it's not regarded as science.
Intermediate theories like PE show some movement towards what I consider to be the beginnings of a healthy objectivity, if only because it shows someone is willing to stand up and say "you know what? We really can't say what happened" (even if they cave a moment later and spin out a "probable" explanation). A little humility can go along way, in my view.
PE is not an intermediate theory. It's evolution. Darwin himself pointed out that the rate of speciation was variable, with long periods of stasis, sometimes followed by (geologically) rapid changes. If the mutated group were geographically isolated from their parent stock, they would, after becoming a somewhat different species, start to spread out to new areas, and they would then appear in the fossil record as if they were suddenly new. This makes a lot of sense. But it's evolution, not anything else.
I think it is analogous to where cosmologists are today. They have abandoned the attempt to restrict their models to the 4 perceivable dimensions to describe the fundamental universe of matter and energy.
I don't see the analogy at all.
Perhaps someday even evolutionists will move past the mechanical chauvinism of the ancient world in their attempts to describe the transcendental universe of life and intelligence.
Perhaps. But they'll probably go where the evidence leads them.
Wow ... ever see the periodic "Table of the Elements"?
EVER wonder how that was arrived at, how the various atoms arrange themselves, interact with each other to form the myriad of compounds that make life possible?
The 'Creationists' simply astound me at how little they seem to understand the very world they live and interact with around them. It's as if they *still* think the world is 'composed' of four basic 'substances': Earth, fire, water and air.