I really don't see what's so hard for people to grasp about this, but there it is anyways.
Asked to provide examples of nonobvious, testable predictions made by intelligent design, John West, an associate director of the Discovery Institute, a Seattle-based intelligent-design think tank, offered one. In 1998, he said, an ID theorist, reckoning that an intelligent designer would not fill animals' genomes with DNA that had no use, predicted that much of the "junk" DNA in animals' genomes — long seen as the detritus of evolutionary processes — will someday be found to have a function.
West said it is up to Darwinists to prove intelligent design wrong.
He offers no evidence that his hypothesis is correct, of course, save for the blind belief that "someday" he'll be proven right. And then there's the idea that he does not have to prove a damn thing, that it is up to scientists to prove him wrong--never mind that they have done so, again and again and again. Does he know a damn thing about the scientific method? Well, let's check his credentials for debunking the core tenet of biology for the past century:
Dr. John West is a Senior Fellow at the Seattle-based Discovery Institute, where he is Associate Director of Discovery's Center for Science & Culture. His current research examines the impact of Darwinian science on public policy and culture during the past century. His other areas of expertise include constitutional law, American government and institutions, and religion and politics.
Dr. West is also an Associate Professor of Political Science at Seattle Pacific University, and he has taught political science and history courses at California State University, San Bernardino and Azusa Pacific University. From 1986-1989, Dr. West served as Managing Editor of Public Research, Syndicated, which distributed essays on public affairs to more than 700 daily and weekly newspapers.
Dr. West has written or edited numerous books, including The Politics of Revelation & Reason: Religion and Civic Life in the New Nation, The Encyclopedia of Religion in American Politics, The Encyclopedia of the American Constitution, Supplement I, The New Federalist Papers, The Theology of Welfare, The C.S. Lewis Readers' Encyclopedia, and Celebrating Middle Earth: The Lord of the Rings as a Defense of Western Civilization. He also has contributed articles to a wide range of scholarly and popular outlets, including National Review Online, FoxNews.com, The Encyclopedia of the American Presidency, Wake Forest Law Review, Policy Review, The Washington Times, The Seattle Times, The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, The Detroit News, and The San Diego Union.
Dr. West holds a Ph.D in Government from Claremont Graduate University and a B.A. in Communications from the University of Washington. He is a recipient of several academic fellowships, including a Haynes Foundation Dissertation Grant, an Earhart Foundation Fellowship, a Richard Weaver Fellowship, and a Chevron Journalism/Economics Scholarship. Dr. West is a member of the American Political Science Association, Pi Sigma Alpha (the national political science honor society), and Phi Beta Kappa.
He's a political science major. He's as qualified to debunk evolution as I am to teach ancient Egyptian--possibly less so.
Further in the article I read this, though, which I found interesting:
Richard Lenski, a biologist at Michigan State University, has been following 12 cultures of the bacterium Escherichia coli since 1988, comprising more than 25,000 generations. All 12 cultures were genetically identical at the start. For years he gave each the same daily stress: six hours of food (glucose) and 18 hours of starvation. All 12 strains adapted to this by becoming faster consumers of glucose and developing bigger cell size than their 1988 "parents."
When Lenski and his colleagues examined each strain's genes, they found that the strains had not acquired the same mutations. Instead, there was some variety in the changes that had allowed each culture to survive. And when the 12 strains were then subjected to a different stress — a new food source — they did not fare equally well. In some, the changes from the first round of adaptation stood in the way of adaptation to the new conditions. The 12 strains had started to diverge, taking the first steps that might eventually make them different species.
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