I think you have it backwards. The “burden of proof” is not on ID advocates to prove ID or to “disprove” evolution (which are essentially equivalent endeavors). The burden of proof is on evolutionists to “prove” evolution, not in a mathematical sense, but in the sense that it actually explains how life got to be what it is.
Evolutionists do nothing of the sort. What they do is *assume* that it explains things because it is the only alternative once ID is rejected a priori. That is why, whenever some new evidence comes along that challenges evolution, evolutionists just yawn and dismiss it. In doing this, they use two tricks:
1. They implicitly (and sometimes explicitly) challenge ID advocates to “prove” that the observed phenomenon could not have possibly come about through Darwinian mechanisms. That is, they get the “burden of proof” backwards.
2. They claim that ID advocates simply are too narrow minded to *imagine* how the observed phenomenon could have come about through Darwinian mechanisms. That is, they don’t even try to explain how the phenomenon is consistent with the ToE; rather, they simply invoke imagination as the answer.
A classic example is a post on FR several months ago that cited a scientific paper that claimed that the human brain is highly optimized as a network. My memory of the details is vague, but the point is that the evos on FR did precisely what I outlined above.
That's news to me. HOW are they equivalent?
Prima facie ID is equally consistent with any amount of evolution and common descent, and equally so with no evolution. After all there are "design advocates" holding both position, i.e. those like Behe who have no problem with common descent, even with (at least potentially) univerisal common descent, and those like Jonathan Wells who seem to be thoroughgoing antievolutionists and quibble even with sub-species microevolution like industrial melanism in Peppered Moths.
It seems to me that -- since ID is consistent with any amount, or no amount, of evoluiton (see also my message just upthread on the vacuousness of ID) -- the question of whether or not "design events" occured is, logically, completely independent of evolution.
There is a connection but it has to do merely with the instrumental matter of detecting "intelligently designed" structures: i.e. the methods of detection suggested by IDers all amount to claiming that this or that structure couldn't have happened "naturally" (by a stepwise evolutionary process) so it must have been "design". However in this very message you explicity reject such logic (saying it couldn't have been that so it must have been this), at least when (you think) evolutionists do it, so this question of detection can't be the reason that proving ID and disproving evolution are "equivalent endeavors".