Read the article in question. It would appear from the discussion that such changes are not so obvious as you claim, given that the process leads, in mice at least, to live births of healthy offspring. The major assumptions on your part are that manipulation would "stick out" (why?), and that they'd be obviously taken from "some other species." Neither of these is necessary.
This simply repeats the previous assertion. You haven't given me any reason why you claim my failure to recognize design is based on ignorance - other than, I suppose, that I fail to recognize evidence of design in nature, which argument is circular.
Your argument has been that there's no design because you wouldn't do it that way; or that what you see doesn't make sense as design. Nothing more or less. While it's probably not to your liking, it's not "circular" to point out the shortcomings of your arguments.
People do claim there are universal design principles.
What people claim that? And of those who might make that claim, do they make the further claim that no other designs are possible than what they, themselves, would recognize?
If you're claiming we can recognize design in nature because it's similar to human design,
Not my claim. I'm claiming, rather, that we have an innate tendancy to accept the possibility of design, because we are designers ourselves. A "natural adaptation" makes sense to us, because we recognize how it satisfies some "design requirement." If you've ever done software, you'll have seen how different programmers will accomplish even the simplest tasks in a variety of very different ways.
you can't reasonably then assert that we can't evaluate design in nature by the same principles we use to evaluate human design.
We certainly can do that -- but we cannot then simultaneously denounce as "idiotic" a purported design that far exceeds the capabilities of what humans can presently achieve. It presupposes knowledge you do not have.
I am trying to refute the entire argument by reduction to absurdity, by pointing out the contradiction between the intelligent designer and manifest inadequacies of the design. They claim life is much too complex and subtle to have arisen by chance; and that since we certainly can't yet make even a bacterium, the designer must be more powerful and smarter than we are, at least. As far as I know, no IDer is claiming the designer could be inept or bumbling.
Then neither you, nor your strawman IDer, is being honest. You, because you're ignoring the factual presence of human intelligent designers; and the strawman IDer, because he does not recognize that the results of human ID are not perfect.
Me, I say nature is profoundly chaotic, and I see that as a reflection of the huge influence randomness had on the origin of species. No contradiction.
Perhaps -- but it's also not science.
That's a non-sequitur. Putting pesticide resistance genes in corn also leads to healthy corn. While it's not automatic that adding a new gene would leave an organism healthy, there's no a priori reason simply adding a foreign gene will be lethal.
The major assumptions on your part are that manipulation would "stick out" (why?), and that they'd be obviously taken from "some other species." Neither of these is necessary.
Sure it is. Monkeys don't have fluorescent proteins of this sort. There is nothing even closely homologous in the various mammalian genomes. The mutation would 'stick out' because using a standard genetic search engine, like BLAST, we'd get hits from this gene to jellyfish genes, but none to humans or other monkeys. Believe me, that would stick out. I'd be thinking 'Nature paper' as soon as I saw the hits.
If you want to check this out, go to the National Library of Medicine site . Pick some human gene at random, and look to see what it's most closely related to. Lots of monkeys, lots of rats and mice, no jellyfish; at least, not in the first 50 hits or so.
BLAST and similar software is quite easy to use ( I taught a class of freshmen to do it this fall) and it's a great way to learn first hand the issues involved in comparing genes across species.
What people claim that? And of those who might make that claim, do they make the further claim that no other designs are possible than what they, themselves, would recognize?
I simply googled 'universal design principles' and got scads of hits. Do thee in like manner.
The crux of your argument seems to be this:
We certainly can do that -- but we cannot then simultaneously denounce as "idiotic" a purported design that far exceeds the capabilities of what humans can presently achieve.
This is a quasi-religious assertion that there are beings of superior intelligence to ourselves, whose purpose is ineffable to our limited intelligences. Sorry, no dice. Until you can show me some system that works, but whose principles are beyond the power of contemporary rational analysis, that's an unproven and decidedly mystical claim, no different than 'There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio' - which, you'll recall, was an argument for the reality of ghosts.