@farmerman,
One of my big problems with ID is the inability to absorb (or denial) of good hard data and evidence of what happened to life wrt to the extinction events that occured through time. We "celebrate" the great 5 extinction events and they are so defined by the percent "dying" of then living species.
There are actually 25 (or 26) extinction events that, many of which , seemed to have major effects on natural selection (by making species less "fit" or having species :radiate" into several niches. The data is quite clear and is reinforced by sedimentary, fossil, vulcanology, isotopics, isotope ratios, paleosol, amber, and fossil pollen, etc etc .
These lesser extinction vents saw many Species that were going along and got wiped out with no further traces,(like trilobites) or species jut plodding along, radiating and then dying off while perhaps leaving some daughter specis (like dinosaurs), or just seeing the changes that occurred without any apparent direction or reason. In each of the lesser extinctions we can see the environmental changes that spurred xpansions or extinctions. We can also see the flourishing of new resources like plant foods expand to create niches for grazing or browsing(and corresponding foot tracks and ichnofossils appear almost in association)
If I were an IDer, Id be working like crazy (If I were an ID Scientist)
to show how all this edaphic change going on was "Intelligence defined"
So far though, nobody has taken up any available discoveries to do that, the IIDers seem to rely mostly on denial and"me too ism".
When a major group of animals exists for over 250 million years, has expanded into thousands of genera and tens of thousand species, then disapperss without any connection to subsequent life, whats an IDer say about how his guy works his magic.