In a private listserv the question was recently asked by one of the participants:
Just out of curiousity, what would we consider to be the fundamentals of biology? Obviously, you can do biology without trying to shove everything into Darwinian just-so stories.
Professor Dembski thought my answer worth repeating on Uncommon Descent so here it is:
The salient question is what CAN’T you do in practical biology without resort to mechanistic theories of prehistoric evolution. The answer appears to be there is nothing you can’t do. Modern biology is the study of living tissue not imprints in rocks or theoretical ancient ancestors. Knowledge of The Edge of Evolution is critical in some areas. One needs to know, for instance, the mutational means that pathogenic microorganisms employ to thwart therapeutic drugs just as one needs to know they don’t have to worry about those same microorganisms mutating into substantially new phenotypes. One has no need at all to subscribe to any theory that supposes the same organisms had substantially different ancestors millions of years ago. There is no practical application for the theory that chance and necessity turned mud to man over billions of years. Whether true or not the supposed RM+NS mechanism over deep time works too slowly to have any practical consequence measured over the course of hundreds of years except at the fringes where one or several random nucleotide changes effect medically important consequences without otherwise notable phenotype change.