Talk about a debate.
I think that I'll restate my view on this stuff:
Evolution, as I was taught it, was more a statement of how things are now, it wasn't presented as an origin tale. The closest to an origin tale was a theory involving a primordial soup and a great big 'we don't really have any clue'.
The other thing I got was that evolution, backed up by some genetic trait stuff by Mendel and his peas, is a lot like teaching Newton to the kids rather than Einstein's theory of relativity. Getting into things like bacterial chromosome exchange, stimulated mutation/evolution, etc... is more for biology classes rather than general science. I'd expect general science to cover evolution(the non-origin version), a bit about DNA and the resultant traits, dominant and recessive genes.
So far, I, at least, haven't seen any ID theories that weren't based more on religion than science. Meanwhile we can trace genetic lines back thousands of years, find inactive genes in humans that program for a tail that is active in monkeys, heck, we even have most of the programming for gills still in our genetic heritage. We share so much in common with rats and mice that they're used in medical testing; their reaction to drugs is usually nearly identical to ours.
Yes, we've found far more fossils than we had back in the 1700's. It's still very much a matter of winning the lottery. We're talking about millions of years here. For a single species of dinosaur, that'd take a thousand specimens(more likely 2k with the way finding them is random), to give us a semi-steady 1k year time difference between samples to inspect for gradual change. A thousand years is a thousand generations of deer, for example.
Also, change doesn't necessarily have to be that gradual - a small genetic change can have a profound difference in phenotype. Consider that the difference between being 'black' and being an albino is a single gene, can even be a single change in the genetic code.
We have found intermediate candidates for a number of species, but the impression I've gotten is that ID proponents aren't happy with this, as they're looking to prove their version of creation, based off of the bible. It's like we have sample A that we think transitioned into sample C. The ID proponent demands to see B - but if we do so he then demands to see AB & BC. So on and so forth. Or we find A, AB, and C and he's not happy because he wants to see B & BC.
It also doesn't help that there's lots of dead ends in evolution - most species end in extinction rather than branching off into new species.
Besides, it's not like our theoretical intelligent designers couldn't have used chaos theories and decided on a chaotic system to perform their work - set some seeds and leave, trusting to random chance backed by statistical odds to create what they wanted.
