The problem with saying that ID should be taught in science class is that it is not scientifically justifiable. Yes, there is an appearance of design in the biological world. This appearance, however, is just that: an appearance. The explanation for this appearance is natural selection, in which there is an unconscious, unintelligent designer in the form of the environment in which organisms reside. The environment selects from heritable variation introduced by gene flow from other populations, and ultimately arising from random, stochastic mutation from ancestral genetic states to adapt populations over time. As the environment is unconscious and without foresight in its selection, and as it must select from what is available instead of what is best, biology is rife with design compromises that result in adaptive imperfections (Google Rubisco and plants, for instance). The living world we see around us, the more we study it, conforms to the predictions arising from evolution in which adaptation is the product of natural selection. Granted, natural selection is not the entire story, given the roles of mutational history, organismal constraints due to evolutionary history, stochastic genetic drift (see Sewall Wright), and the capriciousness of environmental change, but evolution as a general phenomenon is real. There is simply no other way to naturalistically explain the living world. This is not to say that people cannot have religious or philosophical views that incorporate non-naturalistic forces and aspects. They can, but they can not say that those beliefs are scientific. If one is thoughtful, one can easily find accommodation to both ways of viewing the world (I can vouch for this. I am a graduate student in an academic lab in which we study aspects of evolution in experimental bacterial contexts. This lab has included over the years devout Catholics, Hindus, Muslims, and Jews. They had no problems at all). ID can be a valid religious or philosophical view, but it is not scientific. Indeed, to insist upon a scientific basis to ID, one would have to explain those imperfect adaptations I mentioned, which would lead one to believe in an incompetent, goofy designer at best, and a dark trickster god at worst (i.e. it would be very bad theology if nothing else). ID should thus not be taught in science classes as a going concern. It should be discussed in a historical context, however, as it is fundamentally the view of biology that was overturned in the 19th century by Darwin.

Another point: Evolutionary biologists do not refer to themselves as Darwinists. We call ourselves evolutionary biologists. The field has progressed very far since Darwin came up with the precursors to modern theory (go to a university library and see the literally millions of pages of text in journals detailing the studies and experiments that have been done since Darwin). He is very highly regarded, but the field does not rest upon his authority. To refer to an evolutionary biologist as a Darwinist is just as silly as to refer to a physicist as a Newtonian or Einsteinian.

The Professor is correct. When it comes to large, multicellular organisms with long generation times, it is unlikely that we will speciation on a human time scale (Well, except for possibly with insects. I seem to recall Guy Bush publishing on an instance of speciation in apple maggot flies due to a shift to another host fruit species). However, speciation can still be observed in other contexts. Certain in plants we see speciation all the time due to hybridization and polyploidy. So, too, has speciation been seen in bacteria. In the lab I work in we have observed incipient speciation in at least two instances in experimental populations of E. coli. Part of the problem with speciation claims, however, is that it is very hard to determine exactly what is a species. It is a complex question that has given rise to literally dozens of species definitions and boundary arguments (indeed, there are those who argue that, among other things, the degree of horizontal gene transfer in the prokaryotic domains mean that unicellular microbes can't really be held to have species like we see in multicellular eukaryotes). What it comes down to is that science has uncovered a world far, far more complex than its attackers (or even its supporters) seem to realize. Again, I urge those who don't (and even those who do) really think there is much real work that has been or is being done in evolutionary biology to go to a university library and ask to see the biology journal collections. There are literally millions of pages reporting on more than a century of good scientific work in those collections, with thousands more being added each month. Evolutionary biology is a vibrant field with many active workers in hundreds of areas pursuing innumerable questions. There is much that is not clearly understood right now (thank goodness, or else I wouldn't have a career), but we have only been working for about a century and a half. Give us another millennium or so.

Finally, before you make sweeping and derogatory generalizations about evolutionary biology from positions of ignorance, try looking into the field to see if it is anything like what you think.

My two cents...