Although ID continues to gather supporters, it happens now and again that erstwhile ID supporters lose their enthusiasm and jump ship. One such former supporter is a very prominent European scientist. I met him first in 2004, when he was still attracted to ID. Now he is no longer. I asked him about this recently:
Question: If not ID, what then? The Darwinists are bankrupt. And the self-organizational theorists are hopelessly fuzzy. James Shapiro — he presupposes the very thing that needs to be explained, namely, the origin of systems that perform their own “natural genetic engineering.” Kirschner and Gerhardt are no better with their “facilitated variation” — whence the facilitation?
He responded:
Excellent question of course. So the search continues… [sic] As for ID, more fundamental work on the practicality of design detection is crucial — and your strength. But in the end, ID will only fly if a more concrete story can be told about the mechanism of design implementation, how the actor acts.
This objection has always seemed to me, at least in part, to miss the point, seeking to reduce an act of creative intelligence to a mechanism (on the order of reducing consciousness to computation). And yet, the question of how design gets implemented in natural history does seem to be critical to understanding ID.
Thoughts?