Shorter Uncommon Descent

At the home of top IDolator Bill Dembski, some other IDolator writes a post best summarized as:

Exaptation proves ID.

No, really. Actual quote:

While the article does not directly address the implications for Darwinism of the existence of “latent” or “preexisting” evolutionary potential, the impossibility of fitting this concept into the standard neo-Darwinian paradigm is obvious.

If only someone had come up with a term like exaptation to describe the situation in which selection acts on features which originally evolved in a very different context in response to new challenges.

More like this

A new ID book, a new selection of yummy delicious quote mines. Michael Behe's The Edge of Evolution (EoE) offers quite the smorgasbord I'm not surprised that Jerry Coyne would have such a visceral negative reaction to anything Michael Behe writes. He was the victim of one of the more egregious…
Philosopher Thomas Nagel recently published a book called Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False. The general consensus was that the book delivered considerably less than it promised. H. Allen Orr's negative review from The New York…
Today's New York Times has a series of articles up about various aspects of evolution. One that caught my eye was this essay by paleontologist Douglas Erwin. It discusses various challenges to the Neo-Darwinian synthesis. Not the silly, brain-dead challenges of the creationists and ID folks, but…
Even here in Minnesota, we get creationists ranting in the newspapers. This one is in the Brainerd Dispatch. In response to a previous writer's statement " ... modern neo-Darwinian synthesis of organic evolution is supported by more compelling and intellectually satisfying empirical evidence that…

Well, doesn't everything evolve from something? The example in the link above says that feathers for flight is an exaptation of feathers for insulation. But insulating feathers evolved from scaly skin which allowed for life away from water and on and on. Maybe I'm just not clear on the nuance.

Well of course exaptation proves ID. Everything proves ID. Everything is how the designer dunnit! QED.