But predications after the fact don't carry much weight. Well... yes and no... if nothing else, anomalies seem good places to go asking why? "It may have been a random event," thinks the observer. "But I wonder."
What is it that ID would look for? None of the ID advocates have been able to come up with anything.
Exactly... I think I.D. is good speculation and quite possible... But the advocates have to come up with a way of testing it to call it science.
Moving your earlier comment down:
The kinds of manipulation being done in laboratories would cause trouble if found in the wild. Pig genes in tomatoes and such.
Imagine this, though.... Civilization collapses and mankind forgets science, as a pig-gened tomato makes it into the wild.... 10,000 years from now a new civilization has rebuilt science and is trying to breed better tomatoes.
Might they notice a pig gene in a "wild" tomato? And if they did, how would they try to account for it?
This is the stuff of science fiction.
I have a little (very little) story along those lines. When I was about 10 years old my family vacationed on Sanibel Island in the Gulf of Mexico. I had just seen a movie that inspired me to put my name and address in a bottle and toss it into the Gulf.
Some months later I got a letter from a marine scientist asking where I had tossed the bottle (the address was for Jacksonville, on the opposite side of Florida).
Anomalies pop up all the time in science, and you just have to accept some noise as unexplained. I'm sure the person who found my bottle knows what vacations are, and probably shrugged it off.
But how can you test for the cause of anomalies if you don't have a history or a possible history? I don't for example, have explanations for all cases of crying statues, ESP, UFOs and such, but I trust my intuition about such things, and hold a placemarker for them in case one of them acquires better evidence.