I didn't mean to give that impression. The search for rules of design in nature is not new to science. But it is a mistake to confuse the research of patterns, designs, common motives, etc. with the design terms used by the ID movement. As politicians, the IDers have coopted terms and smudged the boundaries of various issues. Intelligent Design offers no more an explanation for design rules in biology (think of power laws, for instance) than it offers for any other law of nature. It has no predictive or explanatory power.
This is also restrictive to the character of science, for it determines that its object conforms only to present evidence. Patrick Henry is correct on this.
Intelligent Design offers no more an explanation for design rules in biology (think of power laws, for instance) than it offers for any other law of nature. It has no predictive or explanatory power.
I think that issue is being addressed: Becoming a Disciplined Science: Prospects, Pitfalls and Reality Check for ID (pdf)
And what great discoveries have been made following evolutionary theory? Evolution has no explanatory power at all. Random mutation? What does that explain? How can one make predictions about a process which will result in random consequences? The answer is one cannot.
The only explanation which evolutionists claim is that one can compare one species with another and learn something about them that way. Well, this was being done thousands of years before Darwin and evolution. Aristotle and his people were dissecting animals to see how their bodies worked in order to learn how our own worked. So evolution has no claim to this insight. Interestingly for thousands of years, following this insight people thought that organisms were intelligently designed. Evolutionists, like Clinton, have taken everything good in science and claimed it for their own. However, this insight disproves evolution, it does not support it. The reason is the problem which evolutionists call 'convergence' or the creation of similar structures in totally unrelated species. The use of similar structures, similar genes, similar functions in widely diverse and totally unrelated species proves that evolution cannot explain the nature of organisms. ID though can explain it quite well. Like any intelligent designer - say a kid with an erector set - the intelligent designer which made the different species borrowed pieces from one and used it in another with slight modifications here and there. This perfectly explains the problem of convergence and why ID has more explanatory power than evolution.