What predictions does Intelligent Design make?

[Naraoia]

I can hang with everything but that last bit, which could include speciation, which occurence is uncontroversial. It has to be more of a shift than that for "macro" to have any meaning.

Unfortunately, "speciation and above" is the most accepted definition of macroevolution. That may mean it's a meaningless term - it doesn't mean that it's correct to use it only for "and above".

That said, I wish people stopped making up these really awful terms for large-scale evolution. Not very long ago I encountered "mega-evolution" in a completely serious book compiled from the materials presented at a completely serious scientific meeting. Ouch.

Which according to Einstein was less than one trillionth of one percent of anything. That included all human knowledge in his time.

And I'm sure Einstein's estimate is accurate

Still, I can't know something about the world from information I don't have. So I must go with what I do have.

What reason did Newton have to do otherwise when he observed the apple falling? Why ask why the moon doesn't fall when the question hadn't come along yet?

I've never said anything about asking new questions. The "might be" is new facts not adequately explained by known theories. Of course, some old facts may not be adequately explained - I didn't say you shouldn't ask questions about those.

Evolution is so far not contradicted by any fact I know of, so I accept it as a good theory until such facts come along.

Note that that doesn't extend to many details of evolutionary theory. On that level, there are gazillions of interesting unanswered questions. But for now, to question whether evolution (including "macro-", "mega-" and similar monsters) occurs/occurred is doubt for doubt's sake.

Which you admit you don't know is an illusion.

Yes, so?

Self-awareness,

Is a fuzzy concept made up of many different abilities. To my knowledge, (mind you, psychology is a very marginal side-interest of mine) quite a few animals, including other apes and dolphins, display at least some of these components. (Self-recognition, for example)

I don't know if any other animal has been conclusively demonstrated to have a theory of mind (awareness that others have their own knowledge and intentions that aren't the same as yours), but given that many of them are able to deceive, I think it's reasonable to assume that at least parts or prerequisites of a ToM are also present outside humans.

the ability to ask why,

Can that ability even be tested without having a common language? A great part of the difficulty in animal cognitive research is that you normally must infer thought processes from behaviour, and I think this would be one of the most difficult questions to answer in that way.

and conscience

Again, how are you so sure it's unique to humans?

Conscience is an internal reward-punishment system that makes you adhere to a moral code because you feel good about adhering to it and bad about violating it.

Animal societies have rules, if not moral codes proper; they punish those who violate the rules and often return cooperation in kind. An example for both of those is vampire bats, who regurgitate blood for those in need - but they are more likely to do that to bats who have helped them previously. Greedy ones and cheaters don't get many donations. This is an external system of enforcement, but it's conducive to the evolution of an internal one (if a rudimentary conscience prevents you from cheating, you're less likely to be disadvantaged by punishment).

And again, testing for the presence of something like conscience is very, very difficult. You can perhaps determine that a creature behaves as if it has some sense of right and wrong or fairness, but whether it has a conscience...?

(Read Marc D. Hauser's Wild Minds for a good glimpse of just how difficult it is to interpret psychological experiments on nonhumans - incidentally, he thinks [or thought, as of that book] that morality is unique to humans. I don't remember his reasons, though, and I don't have the book on me.)

1. If it could we'd see it in other species.

Which is what a huge field of psychology is all about - and from what I know, it's a huge field of controversy, too. There's a lot we don't know about animal minds yet, and there's a lot that some think we know but we might not. What is almost certain, though, is that bits and pieces of many "uniquely" human abilities are there in nonhumans, which is in keeping with the idea that there should be transitional forms leading to fancy things like human minds.

(Another important thing to consider is that the qualities you listed are most likely not independent. As far as I can tell, you need self-awareness to have the others.)

2. These attributes can be lost, or at least go dormant, in the space of a generation.

What do you mean by that?

It hardly makes sense that such a time intensive process would implode with such caprice.

On the contrary, I think it makes a lot of sense: if self-awareness and morality are complex abilities (you might even say irreducibly complex), then it doesn't take a lot to implode them.