I agree.
Well, yes, but what the ID people mean is not that organisms have no direction, but that the mutations which make them evolve are supposed by modern evolutionary theorists to be undirected, in the sense that they occur without foresight of, or reference to, future evolutionary advantage or disadvantage. And natural selection is supposed to be undirected, in the sense that no one from on high is telling it what organisms are to live and what organisms are to die. It just kills off what it kills off, without any plan or purpose. It kills the unfit, not because it plans to, or wants to, or has any grand scheme for evolution, but because unfit organisms just don’t make it.
Yes, but here I didn’t mean “machine-like”. When evolutionary biologists speak of mechanisms of evolution (e.g., drift, lateral gene transfer, mutation, selection), their point is not to prove that organisms are like machines. Their point is that these are the factors, operations, processes, means, etc. by which the evolutionary process is driven. So change it to “unplanned operations” or “undirected factors” or the like.
Let’s distinguish between your position and that of “modern evolutionary theorists” (which is supposedly some body of scientists who have agreed on what causes evolution, though I’ve rarely seen this agreement manifest itself in the way they talk to and about each other). My point was that “modern evolutionary theorists” on the whole see no teleology, external or internal, governing the evolutionary process as a whole. They don’t think that organisms direct their own evolution (witness the hostility to Shapiro’s suggestion along that line, and witness Coyne’s mockery of Turner), and they don’t think God directs evolution, either.
Now to your position: I am not averse to the possibility that to some extent organisms can direct their own evolution. I regard the jury as out on that one. Nor are all ID proponents against the idea of internal teleology, though I agree that most of them lean to the external notion of teleology.
But if we set aside your views and mine, and look at the context of the discussion here, what do we see? People are complaining that ID is attacking a strawman, an outdated form of evolutionary theory. I concede that this might be true technically; modern evolutionary theory is no longer neo-Darwinian, but has a richer mix of causes. But it’s missing the forest for the trees. The point is that T. aquaticus, Larry Moran, Jerry Coyne, etc. no more think that evolution is teleological (directed to the accomplishment of a plan or intention) than did the neo-Darwinians such as Mayr, Dobzhansky and Gaylord Simpson. From that point of view, this indignant protest against the term “neo-Darwinism” is a tempest in a teapot. Both the old and the new evolutionary theorists are or would be against ID, and for exactly the same reasons; and Behe, Meyer, etc., object to most of “modern evolutionary theory” for the same reasons that they object to neo-Darwinism.
If anyone thinks that the ID people will be placated by the fact that evolution is now said to be driven by neutral mutations as well as good and bad ones, he is living in a dream world. From the ID point of view, neutral theory is just as non-teleological as neo-Darwinism was – and so is just about every other notion accepted by modern evolutionary theorists, excerpt possibly some of stuff proposed by some of the “structuralists” and by people like Shapiro and Turner, who leave a door open to teleology – but at least the latter two, we are told by the “experts” here, offer only junk science. So even if the ID people acceded to Joshua’s plea and never used the word “Darwinian” or “neo-Darwinian” again, ID would not be one millimeter closer to agreement with “modern evolutionary theory”. The issue here is not one of terminology, but of substance.