Not really. Evolutionary theory is thoroughly, and crucially, entwined and woven together with numerous "auxiliary" principles, as Sober calls them, which render it rich in testable implications. See, for instance, 29+ Evidences for Macroevolution.
ID by contrast is almost completely vacuous. Indeed it is intentionally vacuous. "ID proponents" systematically refuse to entertain or propose, even speculatively, any claims whatsoever about how, when, where, by what agency or in what specific forms "intelligent design" events are actually instantiated.
This intentional lack of empirical content is, I believe, due to the fact that ID is not and never was intended to function as a scientific theory. (Or a scientific program, rather. Even many IDers admit it's not sufficiently developed to qualify as a "theory".)
Instead ID's role is to serve as an inoffensive "umbrella" ideology for antievolutionists and creationists who traditionally have bitterly disagreed about numerous issues such as: the age of the earth, progressive versus sudden/fiat creationism, the "canopy" theory, the global nature (or not) of Noah's flood, the flood's geological significance, and etc, etc, etc.
In a real science, of course, such substantive disagreements would be considered fruitful. But of course creationism is concerned with putting a scientific gloss on "correct" dogma, so such disagreements are intolerable and have led to multiple schisms and/or the dissolution of antievolution orgs affected by them. (See Henry Morris' A History of Modern Creationism for many examples.)
"Intelligent Design" is, then, a "lowest common denominator" that nearly all antievolutionary creationists can support, precisely because it says almost nothing about anything.
Entwined and woven? Thats some real science there!
"Not really. Evolutionary theory is thoroughly, and crucially, entwined and woven together with numerous "auxiliary" principles, as Sober calls them, which render it rich in testable implications. See, for instance, 29+ Evidences for Macroevolution."
Thanks, Stultis. That's an intriguing discussion. It will take me a while to digest it. Once I've done that, perhaps there will be some useful further discussion to follow. Meanwhile, thanks for sharing the reference. Here's a paper that I've been attempting to decipher recently. The discussion at your link seems likely to provide a helpful supplement to the explanations in this article:
SIREV Volume 49 Issue 1
Pages 3-31, ©2007 Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics
The Mathematics of Phylogenomics
Lior Pachter and Bernd Sturmfels
Abstract
(Received May 29, 2005; accepted September 30, 2005; published January 30, 2007)
The grand challenges in biology today are being shaped by powerful high-throughput technologies that have revealed the genomes of many organisms, global expression patterns of genes, and detailed information about variation within populations. We are therefore able to ask, for the first time, fundamental questions about the evolution of genomes, the structure of genes and their regulation, and the connections between genotypes and phenotypes of individuals. The answers to these questions are all predicated on progress in a variety of computational, statistical, and mathematical fields. The rapid growth in the characterization of genomes has led to the advancement of a new discipline called phylogenomics. This discipline results from the combination of two major fields in the life sciences: genomics, i.e., the study of the function and structure of genes and genomes; and molecular phylogenetics, i.e., the study of the hierarchical evolutionary relationships among organisms and their genomes. The objective of this article is to offer mathematicians a first introduction to this emerging field, and to discuss specific mathematical problems and developments arising from phylogenomics.
http://siamdl.aip.org/dbt/dbt.jsp?KEY=SIREAD&Volume=LASTVOL&Issue=LASTISS