All Intelligent Design arguments exist entirely intact or are prefigured in the creationist literature. Most major ID advocates, and all significant ones above a certain age, were once self-described as creationists who advocated the same arguments as ID, only labeled as creationism. The Intelligent Design textbook that the Dover trial was over was a creationist textbook called "Creation Biology" that simply scrubbed out references to creationists and creationism and replaced 'em with intelligent design proponents and intelligent design after creationism was declared unconstitutional to teach in public schools in 1987. As was alluded to upthread, in one humorous example a draft of the text had accidentally had the term "cdesignproponists" in it, thus leaving us a transitional form. The rest of the text, including the arguments once labeled creationism, now ID, were left basically the same. There is every reason to believe that ID is essentially creationism relabeled for rhetorical and legal purposes.
--------------------------------------------------
Natural selection claims that, to the degree an organism actually survives to pass on its genetic material to successive generations...they, well, survive to pass on their DNA to successive generations. All the rest of the verbiage regarding "probability" and some features of living things being "more conducive" to such passing on of genetic material is nothing more than details within the same basic conceptual framework
For whatever reason, I initially read this as as a CC post and was going to pounce on it. Now, I'm less enthused. Anyway...
Natural selection is the notion that heritable traits more conducive to survival and reproduction are more likely to propagate through time. This isn't a logically necessary truth, but in the world we live in it is true. Gilder adopts the old canard that survival of the fittest just defines the fittest in terms of those who survive. But this isn't correct. While fitness impacts the odds of of an organism's survival, luck still plays a role to varying degrees. A better camouflaged animal still might succumb to a disease while its less hidden brother lives on.
One of my favorite quips is that baseball exists to provide metaphors to explain everything else. So I think I'll explain this in terms of baseball.
Suppose I assert that the most talented teams are those most likely to win over time. You reply that this is tautological because I circularly define "most talent" as those who end up winning. But that's not true. By "most talent" I mean having pitchers with the sharpest stuff, hitters with swings that are likely to produce high OPS, fielders with the largest natural range, etc. If you were to take a snapshot on any given day, the most talented teams aren't necessarily those who won the games. Toronto beat the Yankees last night, but the less talented team won. Over the course of a full season, you'll find that generally speaking more talented teams have won more games than the less talented. It is true that at the end of the season your biggest clue as to who is the most talented can by found by looking at the record books, but that doesn't determine the answer; it is a consequence of it.
Such it is with natural selection. In the famous longitudinal finch studies you neglected to read about, there is careful measurement of environmental changes and analysis of how that would impact the efficiency of beak lengths followed by empirical demonstration of beak lengths changing in the population as a consequence of food availability. What was "fit" wasn't described as just whatever would survive, but what would be conducive to it. Natural selection was
predicted.