Remember: we got onto this topic by considering whether and how we might detect "design," with an emphasis on understanding the design. As such it's a good analogy only if we place it in the context of Bacon's "contemporary rational processes," and not ours. And Bacon's world did not include the technological infrastructure required to operate a computer.
because we can read the genetic code, and we do know how it translates into proteins. We may not have all the finer details of interference, suppression, promotion, etc., down yet, but we have a complete chemical structure, and most of the important details of how it operates.
None of which would have been possible without a set of "contemporary rational processes" that provided the technology necessary to obtain that information.
But the set of things we don't understand about the genetic code is circumscribed by mathematical restrictions on what could be in there.
If you've been following the stories on this, you'll have noticed that the size of the "circumscribed area" is continually growing. (And of course we can't focus our attention on DNA alone, because it does nothing unless operated on by the "mechanical infrastructure" of the surrounding cell.
On a more mundane level; we have at least fifty genomes sequenced, and we know that genes within those genomes were not chosen from some menu of possible building blocks according to function, as one would expect if they were designed,
Again -- all you're really saying here is that you wouldn't have done it that way. It's still not a valid argument against design.
I know of no single example of a gene that confounds evolutionary predictions - that is clearly, in a statistically significant way, closer in sequence to an evolutionarily more distant organism than it is to a closer organism.
So what? Why would a smart designer do everything from scratch every time? Once again, this is not an argument against design -- in fact, it appears to be you saying that this is how you might design something.
So your putative designer never, ever, not once chose a fish gene to fulfill a function in an animal in an ecologically similar niche, preferring to adapt a land animal gene instead.
Completely false (not to mention silly.) On the water side: Whale shark/Krill-eating Whale. Great White Shark/Killer Whale. Fish-eating Predator Fish/Dolphins. Starfish/Sea Otter. And on the land side, I suppose you're going to claim that fish didn't come before, and evolve into, land animals?
It makes no sense. And I'm sorry, I think we have more than enough information to say that that's not how an intelligent being would go about designing the biosphere.
And yet, you're making this statement based on arguments from how you would design something. So you freely admit the efficacy of design as an explanation, but are (once again) rejecting design because it's not how you would have done it.
But once again: we already know for a fact that intelligent design occurs, because HUMANS DO IT!
I sense we've hit an impasse here. By all means follow up, but I'm not sure I will. And thank you for a civil and stimulating discussion, something that's rare on a crevo thread.
Thanks. I think it's civil and stimulating because neither of us is trying to ram our point of view down the other's throat. My interest is in looking at underlying assumptions, and you've responded in kind.
The examples you cite are morphologically or functionally, but not genetically similar. Which is exactly my point; if they do the same things, why aren't they made of the same stuff? You get parallel evolution of morphology; you don't get parallel evolution of genes. And yes, ancient fish (not modern bony fish) evolved into land animals; but the differences accumulated between fish and mammals are now huge, much larger than those between land animals and humans. Given any gene in a teleost fish, you can identify it as a fish gene and not a mammal gene from its sequence; it looks like other fish genes of the same type, not like mammal genes. The differences between fish and whales are typically 5 - 10 times as large as the difference between hoofed animals and whales.