It seems that no one have a good evo-psych explanation for children's fascination with products of defacation. Are you going to share your explanation, or do we have to flush it out of you?

(Apologies to Mike, whose joke I just stole.)

Take the fact that you never seem to notice that the toilet paper roll is empty until after it's too late.

I've developed the habit to drop some toilet paper in the toilet before I sit down. This has two advantages: When you flush everything really flushes down without leaving marks and you notice an empty roll before it's too late.

This is the response from an armchair quarterback cheering for the ID side. You can get a more official response by Behe

Thanks. What you wrote is pretty consistent with what I could gather from the refutations I've seen. When I hear from ID critics that IC has not only been refuted but soundly refuted it leaves me scratching my head. But I'm sitting in the ID cheering section also.

Hey maybe we should have a tailgaiting party, paint ourselves bright colors and drink ludricous amounts of beer.

Anyway, it looks like this thread is going to be overrun with potty humor.

Remembering to check for toilet paper requires a certain amount of brain capacity, so you have less of an ability to do other things (like remembering to check for predators, or remembering that stupid advertising jingle that's been stuck in your head since they played it on the radio last week.)

Not-remembering to check has a variable cost. If you have enough toilet paper then the cost is zero. If you don't have enough then you have the labor cost of running the bathroom curtains through the washing machine. On average, that's probably more burdensome than not-checking.

But there's something in the human psyche that prefers a slight risk of a large inconvenience to the guarantee of a slight inconvenience. (From an evolutionary perspective slight future risks don't matter, because the odds are that you'll starve to death or get eaten by a predator long before you run out of toilet paper.)

The solution is to increase the perceived-risk by buying toilet paper in smaller rolls, and to free up additional brain capacity by banning advertising jingles.

Now on to my real question: Obviously, ID critics are convinced IC is falsified. I'm guessing many here are not so sure. Anybody care to offer why or point me to a relevant discussion

Let me take a whack. Though the scientific community has suggested that IC is ID and ID is not science, there has been some amount of energy put in to falsifying the flagellum. My understanding is that the following successes have been made:

1 - A subsystem has been discovered which uses some of the same genes as the flagellum does. This system does a different task than the flagellum. (Sorry, I don't have the name of the system or exatly what it does at my fingertips.)

Though it doesn't make that much difference to the case, Behe and others argue that this subsystem appeared after the flagellum, so it was a devolution of the flagellum rather than a precursor.

However, Behe also pointed in his original text to the concept of cooption, suggesting from the beginning that cooption would not disprove IC. The issue remains that though the other system exists, even if it was a precursor to the flagellum, you can't get to the flagellum from there without a series of mutations that have no natural selection support resulting in a leap that far exceeds UPB.

2 - All but two of the genes involved in the flagellum also have been found doing something else somewhere.

Again, however, this is a mere case of the cooption challenge. What this does show, however, is that the gene level is the correct level to analyze the flagellum from. Ie, if these genes are used elsewhere, one can assume that these genes somehow got together to make a flagellum, rather than the dear thing developing from the individual mutations requred to make a gene — which are monumentous.

If I need 40 separate parts to make a machine. I have the 40 parts, plus 10,000 other parts, in a box, and give it a good shake, I am not likely to get the machine that I want. Even if I have a set of 10 of those parts pre-assembled, and used for some other task, I still am not likely to get my machine. But such is the case against IC.

3 - Somebody, I forget who, has proposed a mechanism for mutation to produce irreduceable complexity. It works something like this: we begin with a gene that does some task. We have a single mutation event producing two copies of the gene. These two genes slowly mutate so that copy 1 is doing half the job, and copy 2 is doing the other half. Now copy 1 looses the ability to do that which copy 2 is doing, and copy 2 looses the ability to do that which copy 1 is doing. At this point both copy 1 and copy 2 are required to make the system go. Extrapolate this concept a bit and — wala, irreduceable complexity.

This argument, however, would require a bunch of supergenes that can do incredible things. I defy anyone to make a rotary motor and control system from one supergene.

4 - There is a "just so story" floating about that proposes a gene-by-gene development of the flagellum, proposing a selective advantage for each gene. The problem with this and all "just so stories" is that each stage seems reasonable from the position of the armchair quarterback. Yet science is supposed to work on evidence. This just so story might be useful fodder for a good research project (but then such a research project would prove that ID produces scientific research and that would be devistating to science and to civilization) but without the research demonstrating that each of the stages (or at least the "we lost one gene", its no longer a flagellum, but it does something useful") is viable in the real world, this remains to be a "just so story".

If anyone has evidence that the challenge of the bacterial flagellum has gone beyond this, please let me know. I believe that this is the state of science on the matter.

This is the response from an armchair quarterback cheering for the ID side. You can get a more official response by Behe

here.

With my post, I believe we've risen to the top, floating serenely in the blogosphere toilet bowl.

Nevermind. Do you know the details of the evolution of wire coathangers? When was the last time you actually purchased a wire coathanger? Does anybody really sell them? Have you seen any for sale? Yet you've gotta admit that no matter how often you clean your closet or move from place to place, there's always more wire coathangers than there were before. Where do they come from?

Safety pins. Now, I've been a costumer in my time, so I know safety pins. All sizes from wee baby gold-color ones all the way to diaper pins with duck-heads. Bra size, slip size, hold-your-pants-up size… I've seen 'em all. And I buy them in bulk quite regularly - because there's never a safety pin around when you need one, even in the junk drawer. I figured it out finally about 15 years ago.

Safety pins are the larval form of wire coathangers…

What is not so clear is why Darwin thought that his theory could actually be falsified according to the criterion which he offered. My suspicion is that evolutionary thinking muddles one's critical thinking apparatus.

This does not mean that Behe's argument cannot be put to good use.