Actually Saletan is misrepresenting the ID opposition.I have been following this very closely and numerous scientists ARE taking on ID hypotheses and demolishing them.Check the National Center for Science Education or AU.

The ones I find more fascinating are the Apocalypse,Revelations crowd with their Left Behind series.Living in the end times they see all kinds of current clues that the moment is at hand!

I have been following this very closely and numerous scientists ARE taking on ID hypotheses and demolishing them.

One of the problems is that doing that is hard to do, and only the experts are in a position to know what the warranted rejection of a hypothesis would look like. The nature of natural selection is that it cannot be falsified by the disproving of this or that hypothesis. Imagine that our Scientist states proposition P as an entailment of the theory, and then tests to see if P holds true. She then follows all respectable procedure and determines that P is indeed false. There are at least three options. Abandon the theory; revise the theory; or leave the theory alone and figure that you've done a bad job predicting which phenomena we should expect to exist in a world like ours in which the theory is true. The importance of the possibility of the last approach makes natural selection (and indeed ID) unsuitable for easy falsification.

But we should not think this impugns the theory. Scientific reasoning is reasoning to the best explanation. Of course, substantive standards for each discipline must be discovered before any such reasoning can be considered cogent. But there is little reason to think that the standards will be the same accross disciplines.--But that is a topic for another time. For now, it is clear that the ID people are not interested in discovering why scientists believe natural selection to be the best explanation of the phenomena. Indeed, ID will always be the best explanation for these people, not because they've got a body of doctrine as battle-tested as science's evolution, because they believe on FAITH, which needs no dirty experiements and even dirtier universites in which to teach them. That's what makes the ID people so dangerous, not the fact that ID is unfalsifiable--because so is evoluation--, and not the fact that ID is not relevant to the enterprise that science is engaged in, because it certainly could be relevant. It's because ID's claim to unfalsifiability is not a thesis made within science, as evolution's is, but rather is a claim to be above science.