Mind you, I think Darwinism falls apart on the fossil record and irreducible complexity issues, but ignoring that for the moment, why do so many evolutionists treat ID theory like the boogyman? Why is it a threat?
I think Dawkins let slip the answer: Darwinism makes it possible to be an intellectually-fulfilled atheist (or agnostic, or deist, or whatever one's prefered form of non-theism). As soon as you enter a Designer as the root cause, regardless of your theories on evolution after that you loose that intellectual fulfillment. It's as much an attack on the atheist's creation myth as "primordial soup" Darwinism is on Genesis--and those wed to this myth react with the same outrage as a religious zealot.
If we could remove the invective from the conversation (not just here on FR, but in the media and scientific community as well), I think we'd get more done.
"Darwinism" is a construct of Creationists.
The fossil record supports the Theory of Evolution in all particulars.
And, finally, "irreducible complexity" does not exist. Or, at least, all examples put forth so far have been demonstrated to have evolutionary predecessors.
... but ignoring that for the moment, why do so many evolutionists treat ID theory like the boogyman?
Very simple. Scientists understand that it is not a scientific theory - it is not even a valid scientific hypothesis. Did you overlook post #114 directed at you? Do you want to try to address it now? Do I need to repeat it to you?
But yet...
Biology = function -> structure -> sequence
It is reverse engineering and quite frankly, looking at technology far more advanced then anything man has created.
We have always underestimated cells. . . . The entire cell can be viewed as a factory that contains an elaborate network of interlocking assembly lines, each of which is composed of a set of large protein machines. . . . Why do we call the large protein assemblies that underlie cell function protein machines? Precisely because, like machines invented by humans to deal efficiently with the macroscopic world, these protein assemblies contain highly coordinated moving parts.
Bruce Alberts, "The Cell as a Collection of Protein Machines: Preparing the Next Generation of Molecular Biologists," Cell 92 (February 8, 1998): 291.
Now what stops science from viewing this obvious design and what is the difference between what Albert says and what Dembski says here?:
Organisms display the hallmarks of intelligently engineered high-tech systems: information storage and transfer capability; functioning codes; sorting and delivery systems; self-regulation and feed-back loops; signal transduction circuitry; and everywhere, complex, mutually-interdependent networks of parts. For this reason, University of Chicago molecular biologist James Shapiro regards Darwinism as almost completely unenlightening for understanding biological systems and prefers an information processing model. Design theorists take this one step further, arguing that information processing presupposes a programmer?
- Dembski
Overlooks that ID, like so much of creationism, is sniping at evolution without advancing a story of its own. Overlooks that so much of that sniping consists of mantras directly cribbed from creationism. Overlooks that the ID advocates below the level of Discovery Institute staffers are creationists pure and simple (no wordplay intended).
Creationism has studied from the political left and discovered the concept of "front movement." I can remember considering myself an environmentalist until the early 80s, about the time Greenpeace was calling for the unilateral disarmament of the west. It hit me then: these people are communists out to destroy traditional western society and masquerading as people caring about something else in order to do it.
I would have had to be dumb as a brick not to see the light when I did. I would say the same about anyone who doesn't realize that an ID advocate is a religiously motivated anti-science crusading witch doctor.
I've been avoiding jumping into these discussions lately, but I wanted to make the point that "irreducible complexity" is not a term of art and that its use in practice is mathematically self-inconsistent. The use of this notion to "prove" anything betrays a fundamental non-understanding of the principles that nominally are behind it.
First, all biological systems must be reducible, since the laws of thermodynamics have not been repealed. And even if no person ever figures out a reduction, such a reduction does exist (see: Solomonoff, 1978). Furthermore, in the general case such reductions are intractable i.e. if you can not observe the transition path then it will generally be impossible to discern the reduction in most non-toy systems (see: Hutter, 2000). Though we can make really good guesses for some classes of system and under certain conditions (see: Feder et al, 1992), which is what we limit ourselves to in practice.
The second problem is that "irreducibly complex" sounds very suspiciously like an actual term of art, particularly in algorithmic information theory: Minimum Description Length (MDL) (see: Kolmogorov). The only obvious reason that they invented a new term for ID purposes rather than using a standard term that had been around for almost a half century in the field they were nominally borrowing from is that properties are ascribed to "irreducible complexity" that can trivially be shown to be nonsense when you call it MDL. This is the "mathematically self-inconsistent" part I mentioned above. It is pretty much literally as if I decided that "1+2=3" is convenient for my theory but I really need "2+1=4" for everything to work out, and so I redefine mathematics to support this notion. You can do it but it will be completely broken, which irreducible complexity is in fact. You can make the mathematics support it, but not any mathematics that actual mathematicians generally use.
BTW, the papers referenced have nothing to do with evolution or ID, but are actually seminal and fundamental mathematical papers (all relating to the broader field of information theory) that prove the general point that references them. It is sad that "information theory" ID theorists like Dembski actually have some type of pseudo-credibility with ID proponents when most of what they write is grossly inconsistent or outright disprovable with the core theorems of the field nominally being used to prove the point. (Dembski is one of the worst offenders of this and therefore attracts much ire from me.)
None of this speaks to whether or not there is a Designer, but most current ID theory that I'm familiar with is trivially disprovable with the standard theorem set of algorithmic information theory. Which is fine -- you just need to develop a better theory for ID -- but it does not exactly speak to the credibility of the people currently working on ID theory.