Yes, very valuable. But how do you show that? So far, Behe's examples have all been failures:
Behe's "irreducible complexity" argument is fatally flawed. Ichneumon's post 35.
Irreducible Complexity Demystified. Major debunking of ID.
The Flagellum Unspun: The Collapse of "Irreducible Complexity," Kenneth R. Miller. Critique of Behe.
However, if there were something like, for example, an animal with one limb that had a functional M-16 built into it, and there were absolutely nothing remotely related to that in the fossil record, then we'd have to agree that it would certainly have the appearance of design. But nothing comparable is ever discovered.
Indeed. It's really frustrating to see what's going on, because if you just look at Behe's claims, disregarding the conclusions, if those were verified they would be, in my opinion, an aid to teaching evolution. What you would then have is evidence that simple additive genetic mutation is not sufficient to produce the species we have, that these more complex mutations have to be taken into account, and that they're not just theoretical, that they actually happen. That, to me, brings more insight into evolution.
I feel like in a saner world, this would be the conclusion of the irreducible complexity argument, and it would be cool and people who read about it would say "wow, that's pretty cool" and things like evolutionary algorithms would start to include these mutations into their mutation set and all kinds of neat things might happen and we might even call it the "Behe Mutation Set" and now none of that is happening...