[Doctor Stochastic]

1) Knock-out proofreading systems from cellular replicative, translation, and transcription machinery. The ID hypothesis would be that evolvability will be lost, i.e. this altered population will shortly yield its existence to error catastrophe.

How does this distinguish ID from other other evolutionary theories?

[jazzraptor]

I wrote: Knock-out proofreading systems from cellular replicative, translation, and transcription machinery. The ID hypothesis would be that evolvability will be lost, i.e. this altered population will shortly yield its existence to error catastrophe.

You wrote: How does this distinguish ID from other other evolutionary theories?

I wrote this to Nebullis on another thread:

ID is not a theory, and ID is not a hypothesis. ID is often put in contradistinction with evolution by those who do not understand it. You made that error earlier. ID should be put in contradistinction with MN as practiced by evolutionary biologists. It is an epistemological challenge to the philosophical underpinnings of the field.

Every field of Science has slightly different epistemology. Archaeologists, for instance, don’t exclude teleology in their science. (That would be silly, hmm?) Yet evolutionary biologists clearly do. As Christian De Duve says: "Any hint of teleology must be avoided."

So the listed hypothesis that begins this thread is not THE ID hypothesis; it is one possible hypothesis that is consistent with ID and inconsistent with MN.

Why is it inconsistent with MN? Because the MN assumption requires the conclusion that life came about by abiogenesis. If self-replicators require proofreading to be evolvable, then abiogenesis within the biochemical platform is impossible.