[Alamo-Girl]

Thank you for your reply!

The fact that you make sneering references to "happenstance" says more about the difficulty of the concept of natural selection than about its veracity.

The happenstance pillar is not the natural selection pillar, it is the part boldfaced below:

random mutations + natural selection > species

[js1138]

The happenstance pillar is not the natural selection pillar, it is the part boldfaced below:

random mutations + natural selection > species

This leads to several questions:

1. Does ID (or you -- split your answer, if necessary) accept the fact of speciation and/or common descent?
2. Does variation have a preprogrammed direction?
3. Does variation anticipate need, or is it biased toward need?
4. If you were able to replace the major species -- say bird, reptiles, mammals, insects and flowering plants with the organisms from 500 million years ago, would speciation follow the same path due to an internal program?

Obviously the later questions depend on at least a qualified Yes to the first question. I am not trying to put you in a box. I simply want to know if IDers believe that variation is the working out of a program that has a direction or goal.