Kitzmiller v. Dover Board of Ed. -- aka the "Panda Trial" - Page 4

If, for example, you kept finding modern fish fossils mixed in with trilobite fossils, that would be a good reason to begin questioning the geological and paleontological record.

Please note that one such coincidental finding would not be enough -- there's enough upheaval in the geological stack that weird spots of data do occur. Before you leap, however, at the often jumbled-up state of the raw data as an excuse to discredit the whole venture, please realize that by collecting data from numerous sites and performing statistical correlations, very clear pictures emerge from the raw data which are not at all impugned by a few scattered and expected bits of noise.

I can only give examples of how evolution might be falsified -- there are many, many conceivable forms of falsification. The more and more time that goes on, however, the more and more likely doors for falsifying evolution close.

Plenty of scientists were ready to embrace evolution at the end of the 19th century when the amount of fossil data available was paltry compared to what we have today, at a time well before the discovery of DNA, well before the development of techniques for comparing DNA, well before many sophisticated techniques for dating fossil findings were developed, etc. The available data were convincing even back then, and as time has gone by, new data and new discoveries continue to fit, and fit again, and fit again. It becomes increasingly improbable that all of this wonderful agreement with the broader scope of evolutionary theory is some fluke of bad technique, skewed findings, fudged data, etc. It's increasingly improbable that some discovery is lurking just around the corner to blow evolution out of the water. If some such bit of evidence were found, you'd have an exceedingly puzzling mystery regarding how all of the previous data managed to look so good.

You'd said something earlier about us having only a tiny fraction of a percent of the available data, and how this should make us skeptical about what we conclude from that data. To some small degree, this is true, but the uncertainty is in no way proportional to the amount of unexamined data. If you were sampling a just a few plants in an enormous field of clover, you might miss the fact that such a thing as a four-leaf clover exists. It's terribly, terribly unlikely, however, that you'll come up with all four-leaf plants and get a completely skewed picture of what the typical clover plant is like. Once you account for factors like what things are likely to become fossilized or not (soft-bodied creatures, for instance, are highly under-represented in the fossil record), it's a very reasonable assumption that whatever you find in the fossil record typifies the most abundant plants and animals of its time.

That's not my job to answer that's the job of ID-ers to discover. It's an intriguing idea that one might discover an objective measure of design -- I'll give these guys credit for an interesting concept. The problem is that ID hasn't yet advanced beyond the idea stage -- something even the folk at the Discovery Institute admit themselves.

Dembski, for example, has some mathematics by which he tries show that such-and-such a protein or other biological structure has some very low (typically vanishingly small, 10^-300) probability of arising by chance, but there are many holes in these calculations (which I can expand upon later if you wish). The biggest problem, however, is that so far there's no way to test whether or not one's calculation of very tiny probabilities is simply do to a lack of knowledge or a failure of imagination about various ways these structures might be favored for formation in ways that greatly enhance their probability.

Depends to what extent irreducible complexity was found.

Suppose irreducible complexity were only found in humans. That would at least indicate some sort of special attention was lavished on our own species -- an idea that would appeal to many people. But, depending on many other circumstances, it could mean anything from divine intervention to a 2001: A Space Odyssey scenario where aliens intervene to advance an early primate to a more advanced level.

If strong signs of irreducible complexity were commonplace, but the historical aspects of evolution remain unchallenged, that would lend credence to a form of "assisted evolution" -- but whether or not that indicates the involvement of God, or maybe that we're just some alien civilization's science project, would be hard to tell.

You'd have to find both numerous signs of irreducible complexity and a lot of incredible evidence against the paleontological and geological record to get anywhere near displacing evolution, and many other disciplines of science at the same time, with a picture that looks much at all like young-Earth creationism.

The "suddenly" is important -- taking "suddenly" to mean over such a geologically short period of time that you wouldn't tend to find a whole series of intermediate forms, or at least such a long gap in the fossil record that missing forms could have come and gone in between the non-winged and the winged variety of pig.

What would really unlikely is wings on a pig which still additionally had four feet -- that would a major departure from mammalian skeletal structure, unlike the wings on a bat, which one can see are merely an adaptation of the arms/forelegs and hands/front paws of other mammals.