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Individual cases of 'irreducible complexity' can be falsified, but ID can't ...

I think the claim that ID can't be falsified is aimed at something other than an endless series of challenges along the lines of "You haven't explained this one!" Evolution makes predictions, based on the concept of common descent. Every new fossil must fit into The Tree of Life. If something is found that's obviously out of place (the proverbial Precambrian rabbit), it falsifies the theory. But with ID, literally anything that may be found is yet another wondrous work of the designer. No pattern is required. ID makes no predictions that can ever be falsified, thus (in that sense) ID isn't testable.

Here's something else to ponder. the second biggest question (after "Who designed the designer?") which the IDers have failed to answer: Where does the hypothetical designer get the knowledge to be able to design something? Creationists are fond of pointing to a car, and saying that there is no way it something so complex could have possibly evolved, that it had to have been designed, and so there is no way something as complex as life could have possible evolved with intelligent intervention. But cars, did in their own way, evolve from simpler forms the same way life did. There's no way any of us are capable of even repairing, much less building one, without a manual, because there is no innate car-building module, and it took years for us to reach the point where we could actually build one on accumulated knowledge, and even then, we were basically just advancing and improving on the wheel. Similarly, whatever type of home you are living in, even if it's some fancy bungalow or condo, traces its line of descent to the first artifical shelters are human ancestors tried to make; and all our timepieces-from the smallest wristwatch to the most accurate atomic clock-started evolving towards their present forms the moment some caveman noticed how the shadow of a tree went in a circle as the day went by.

The point I'm getting at is: IDers claim irreducible complexity is the surest argument for design. I say that it's the greatest argument against design there is. Our brains may still be evolving, but they still run by the same fundamental algorithims which evolved during the period we were living in the savannah, and we're not that much intelligent than our ancestors of a million years back were. The supposed complexities of our modern technology emerged not spontaneously from individual minds, but required years of accumulated knowledge-and one of the reasons I am a conservative is that I believe that any true "progress" (and progress is a word which the left is quickly perverting, hence the quotation signs) is dependent on the preservation of the tradititions which have led us to these heights. There is no way you can convince me that any one "designer" is capable of knowing how to create life, in all its myriad forms and ways, much less the entire universe, unless you are willing to give up your notions of a single omnipotent and omniscient being. And don't give me any of this "lord works in mysterious ways" hocus-pocus. Science is based not just that which is already known, but that which is potentialy knowable, and by maintaing that your beliefs deny such potential, you are admitting that they do not belong in the classroom, much less serious scientific discussion.

For further info on the field of evolutionary epistemology, I recommend Evolutionary Epistemology, Rationality and the Sociology of Knowledge, edited by Gerard Radnitsky and W.W. Bartley (the latter a Hoover Institution fellow until his death). It includes pieces by Sir Karl Popper, who is actually regarded as the founder of the field, and it's probably a more important, but less famous contribution to philosophy than his notion of falsification. I was also surprised to learn that F.A. Hayek wrote one of the earliest tracts in evolutionary psychology, The Sensory Order.