Re: Life does not look designed

Most of what you inherit is a tight knot of workarounds to four
billion years of changing environments making reproduction difficult
in different ways. ... Without the ability to leap back and try a
different thread of development, development is in a steady state of
making the most of what it took to reproduce under _previous_
environments, ecosystems, predator-prey relationships and other arms
races, for the last four billions years.

Your analysis is based on one slightly false assumption, that a given
species is destined to fill a particular ecological niche. What really
happens is that there are tens of millions of different species around
the world, thousands of such in any local environment, so when a new
niche opens up there are thousands of species in the race to see which
can adapt to fill the niche first. (This is roughly analagous to the
current employment situation, where a company announces one job
opening, and gets hundreds or thousands of resumes in response.)
Whichever of those thousands of species is by chance pre-adapted to at
least get by in the new niche (whichever job applicant has
qualifications closest to the job, never an exact match), gets a "foot
in the door" to start breeding in the new niche, and then essentially
gets on-the-job training in-place, giving that one chance species a
growing head-start over all other species. You see, all the other
species aren't able to breed at all in the new niche, so they can't
experience the selection pressure to adapt more closely to the new
niche, or they get only a few individuals by chance wandering into the
new niche so only a tiny bit of selection pressure. But that one
species that "got the job" quickly grows its new-niche population
exponentially to yield thousands of individuals in the niche, each
having a chance of a favorable adaptive mutation, and then after each
such mutation that allelle grows even faster and gets even further
ahead of all competition.

Now pre-adaption that just by chance happens to fit the new niche only
slightly better than the rest of the competition still requires a new
level of jury-rigging each time a switch to a new niche is made, so
there's still 4 billion years of multi-level jury-rigging, but it's not
quite as bad as if one species were pre-destined for a niche and needed
to make a single *major* adaptive change to switch niches, as your
analysis seems to imply (falsely). So it's what you said but not nearly
as much as you implied.

A side effect of one function becomes the basis of another, and so on.

Ah, nicely said. Pre-adaption is truly a *side*effect* of the previous
adaption, a case of serendipity, not like somebody plans ahead to be
adaptable in case the need arises. A smart business will deliberately
try new ventures, just to achieve diversification. Most such ventures
will fail, and will be terminated quickly, like NBC TV series recently.
(Following from a running Jay Leno joke.) But a few new ventures will
succeed in a major way and support the company for tens of years in the
future. Look at Apple Computer which tried several new ideas in the
past 15 years, most of which failed, but a couple recent ideas have
become very very popular. Biological evolution is nothing like that. No
deliberate attempt to invent new niches nor pre-adapt for new niches
that might open. Evolution is more like carpe diem and que sera sera.
(Hey, anybody want to nominate that last sentence for one-liner-of-the-month?)

Natural selection capitalises elegantly on what went before.

No, you said that wrong. NS uses total kluges, not anything elegant, to
capitalize on what went before. And again, it's all by pure chance, not
anything foreseen. The best example of that kind of serendipity in
human research is A.G.Bell yelling "Mr. Watson, come here. I need you!"
and thereby accidently discovering his attempted multi-tone-telegraph
device was pre-adapted to becoming a voice telephone. (I seem to recall
some other equally accidental invention, something like spilling two
chemicals and making a plastic or super-glue, or using a spoiled batch
of something which turned out to be better than if it had been good,
but I can't remember the specifics. Does that ring a bell with anyone?)

Designed things look task oriented and complex. Life looks task
oriented and complex, but life does not look designed.

Indeed, there are several major differences between life and inventions:
- 4 BY of kluge upon kluge upon kluge, as pre-adaptions are by chance re-used.
- purely chance which of tens of millions of species gets each new niche.
- self-replication instead of manufacture by a separate factory/craftsman.
- major integration of components instead of separate components later joined.
- self-growth from zygote to adult instead of direct manufacture of adult.
Surely anyone seeing those differences wouldn't confuse the two??
(Anyone with a working brain anyway, unlike Behe and Dembski, sigh.)

Note that some forms of cultural evolution share characteristics with
both of those. For example, cities grow by internal self-growth by
their inhabitants, not by fully-assembled neighborhoods being assembled
elsewhere then airlifted into the growing city, and they reproduce by
individuals moving to the "country" then starting a famliy business then
getting neighbors who then form a small community which then starts
getting both new local businesses and branches of large corporations
and government institutions such as a post office, and eventually the
community decides to have its own local government thereby becoming a
town, and later incorporates to become a city. But some aspects of
cities are centrally planned by design and some city-improvement
projects are contracted to non-local companies, and at the tissue level
cities are nowhere near as well integrated as living cells or bodies.
..

.

Relevant Pages

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