Keith

No. It doesn't "just happen" to be more successful at having more kids. It reproduces better because it is intelligently DESIGNED to reproduce, and reproduce very well. If the process is not purposeful, then how can these random mutations produce things that are more complex than a space shuttle? Do you believe in miracles?

Keith

Doubting Didymus

Simple. AFTER the random mutations, natural selection ensures that the best attributes stay, and the rest bugger off. This can happen over and over many many times, each time adding a little more complexity to the organisms in the population (provided that said complexity is a bonus for their reproductive sucess).

cricket

Kind of like the reptilian brain - as a component of the human brain?

cricket

Why do you keep saying it's a 'random process'? Natural selection is the opposite of random.

Happy Wonderer

(HW shakes straw out of his hair and mutters to himself a bit.)

Geez, this was the most pointless straw man that I have ever encountered. Trying to prove that evolution has a "goal" advanced your particular version of ID/Creationism exactly how? Yes, it is pretty stupid to think that either nature or evolution has a goal. We don't think that it does. So what?

For awhile there I thought that we had some combination of Kostlerian/Wiccan on our hands. No such luck...

HW (stomps off)

Principia

And yet it is done in engineering all the time -- reusing previous components. Ever heard of the term "backwards compatibility?" Why would backwards compatibility be so important if it was "less than ideal?" Take a look at your PC. Let's count the number of modular components that can be replaced by newer components (and thereby rendering the previous components "old"): RAM, CPU, fans, LEDs, Power supplies, case, software, hard drives, disk drives, CD roms -- many components, but people get the idea. So, clearly your idea of "sync'd" development is not at all true. As has been pointed out, this is a strawman. Who says that evolution "designs" by "highly random processes?" You?

Monkeybot

A more accurate analogy would be if a factory cranked out hundreds of planes every year, each with their own unique variations. Then all these planes are forced to fly. The blueprints for the planes that crash are thrown away. The blueprints for the planes that fly are retained, and used in building the next generation of planes.

Over time, enough planes crash to weed out the truly fatal defects. The blueprints of the more successful planes eventually make up the majority of those in the factory, just as certain alleles show up with greater frequency in a given gene pool.

James Hamlin

So your point in all of this is to string us along in an attempt to get us to prove your point for you? I don't think it'll work. You ask how it happened, someone says it "just happened" (random mutation + natural selection) and you can't handle the answer. If you had your own preconceived and erroneous notion that the individual was "intelligently designed" that you were unwilling to give up, then why did you even ask?

As has been said to many believers before, just cause you believe it don't make it true.

Oolon Colluphid

There was an intelligent designer involved in their design. Okay. Let’s see, in true scientific fashion, if we can make some testable predictions from this.

We might reasonably predict, that if a designer of intelligence was involved, that we should not find in nature examples of really stupid design. There should be no evidence of clear design flaws, such as unnecessarily convoluted ways of doing things, of using excess materials, of structures that are not required by an organism.

Don’t you agree?

And yet, there are indeed countless such features in nature.

There are eyes that do not work in creatures that do not need eyes at all, because they live in complete darkness. Loads of examples: fish, arthropods, salamanders, marsupial moles, naked mole rats...

There are massively excessive quantities of useless DNA in organisms’ genomes. In Drosophila fruitflies, for example, there are three bits of ‘satellite DNA’: sequences just seven bases long that are repeated 3.6, 3.6 and eleven million times. These bits do not code for anything, and would code for rubbish even if they were transcribed. They form 40% of the fly’s entire genome. And humans are no different: the Alu sequences are longer stretches, but are also repeated millions of times.

There is the mammalian recurrent laryngeal nerve, which in order to get from its spinal junction to the larynx -- ie from one side of the neck to the other -- passes down into the chest, loops under the aorta by the heart, then back up again. It does this in all mammals, but is most obviously daft in giraffes, where the nerve travels ten or more feet further than it needs to to do its job.

There are wings on flightless beetles. Yes they are wings; they are pretty well identical in structure to the things that flying ones have. And yes the beetles are flightless: these wings are found on grownd-dwelling beetles that never need to fly, they are often greatly reduced versions of the fly-able ones, and the wing covers (elytra) are fused so the beetles couldn’t use them anyway.

There’s the fact that mammalian testes form inside the abdomen, and then have to pass out of it into the scrotum -- leaving a waekness in the muscle wall that frequently leads to hernias which can both strangle the bowel and stifle blood flow to the testes. Why can testes not make sperm at body temperature, and stay where they form?

There’s the human appendix. No, it does not have a use: the Peyer’s patches in its wall are involved in the immune system, sure, but they are found all through that part of the gut. The amount of tissue involved could be produced more simply by just lengthening the gut a little. It does not need to be the shape it is to do that supposed job. Which coincidentally is just the right shape to get blocked rather frequently, leading to life-threatening infection from the trapped bacteria. It is a stupid piece of design.

The appendix though is not half as stupid as the convoluted methods by which bedbugs reproduce. In some, such as Xylocaris maculipennis, this involves homosexual stabbing rape, with the sperm passing into a rival’s vas deferens via its bloodstream. Or even blue-footed boobies, whose males gather nesting materials as part of their courtship, despite the fact that their eggs are laid on bare rock and no nest is built.

And so on, and on, and on.

So on the one hand, we have an intelligent designer posited to explain, say, bat echolocation. And on the other, we have clear signs that such a designer was not involved, that instead, contingent evolution is responsible for many biological structures. This is intriguing Keith. How do we tell where this intelligent designer intervened, and what was left to mutation and selection?

I’m particularly intrigued about bats. They live by many of the same sorts of niches that birds do, just that they mainly do so at night. Some catch insects on the wing, as do swallows. Some eat fruit, as do a wide range of birds. Some drink nectar, as do eg hummingbirds; some eat fish, as do eg ospreys. Some drink blood, as do some finches. In fact, there is hardly a bird food source that bats do not also use. And crucially, they fly, which requires a lot of energy, and efficient respiration to supply it.

You believe that bat echolocation is evidence for the hand of an intelligent designer. Fine. And yet bats, being mammals, have the standard mammalian tidal respiratory system, which is less efficient than the through-flow one birds have. Why did the intelligent designer do their echolocation, but not use a more efficient system for their breathing? It’s not as if he didn’t know about it, since he presumably put it in birds, even flightless species such as kiwis.

Keith, please explain!

TTFN, DT

Principia

I have to commit some of these into memory, DT. :notworthy:

Anybody want to wager that Keith actually responds substantively to these challenges? Or is he just going to keep asking inane clueless questions?