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The St. Louis Post-Dispatch has an uncommonly astute editorial today. The editorial notes the report of a:

... remarkable new genetic study published last week has demonstrated that the closest living relative of the giant T. rex are birds ? specifically, chickens and ostriches ? rather than reptiles like alligators and lizards.

It then points out the incongruity of the Missouri legislature's attempt to pass an (anything but) "academic freedom" law, aided and abetted by Ben Stein and his traveling burlesque (of science) show, Expelled:

The war is being waged in legislatures and movie theaters because it cannot be waged in the pages of scientific journals. Adherents of so-called intelligent design criticize what they call gaps in the evolutionary record, but offer no scientific alternative to explain the evidence. Indeed, they have tried to redefine the very nature of science to accommodate their preferred conclusion.

In the real world of science, theories gain credence by their power to both explain the past and predict the future. In the case of evolution, that future includes new evidence yet to be uncovered and novel ways of analyzing evidence discovered in the past.

Biologists long ago theorized the link between dinosaurs and birds. Their idea was based not just on the similarity of their bones, but also on fossilized remains of a so-called flying dinosaur in China ? an animal with primitive feathers that could glide for short distances.

Now that science has given us the ability to perform genetic analysis, the evidence for that link is even stronger. Far from undermining the theory of evolution, the results of this new study strengthen it.

That is, indeed, the difference between science and ID. Science starts with a hypothesis that can be decided by empiric evidence and tests it over and over again and changes the hypothesis if incompatible evidence comes along. Only after a hypothesis gains a lot of evidence and survives all tests does it become a "scientific theory."

ID started from a hypothesis that God exists and never tests that core claim -- for the simple reason that science can't test it -- and instead makes the unjustified philosophical claim that anything we can't explain by our present understanding of natural causes must be the work of unnatural forces.

In this instance, ID doesn't even qualify as being for the birds.
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