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Thank you for your reply!

What sense of of the word "random" does ID object to?

Of course, the word conjures up various meanings - but as evolution theory would use it, it roughly equates to a fair toss of a coin.

In ID objections, and that of a growing number of non-ID investigators, the evidence speaks to an organization of functional complexity in fits and starts which would require more than a fair toss of a single coin - a single, random mutation.

Some are inclined to self-organizing complexity, some to metatransition. But the evidence speaks to a direction such as in eyeness developing concurrently across phyla - rather than a randomness in the mutation, i.e. because of the master control genes it could not have gone just any old random direction.

In the usual formulation of evolution, mutation is stochastic, or at least not "aware" of its consequenses.

I'm interested in watching the developments in two areas related to the issue: self-organizing complexity and information (successful communication) in molecular biology. Either could speak to the question of "awareness".

Swarm intelligence investigations may also help find a cause for the whole being more the sum of the parts. And then there's Wolfram's approach...

Someone wrote: In ID objections, and that of a growing number of non-ID investigators, the evidence speaks to an organization of functional complexity in fits and starts which would require more than a fair toss of a single coin - a single, random mutation.

If that's their objection, than the "ID" folks, and the "growing number" (read "miniscule handful") of "non-ID investigators" are scientific illiterates when it comes to evolutionary biology, and deserve no respect on the subject.

Needless to say, evolution proceeds by many more stochastic changes than just "a single random mutation". In any given population it does not take long for literally millions of mutations to occur, and furthermore natural selection (and other types of selection) are the "more" in the (overly simplistic) description of the rise of complexity "requiring more than" mutation alone.

And no, the observation that this often occurs by "fits and starts" doesn't invalidate traditional mechanisms either. I often see "fits and starts" in the increase in fitness (and the pace of novel functional innovations) when I'm doing problem-solving by genetic algorithms (which are just another instance of evolution). Evolution will "stumble upon" a quantum improvement every once in a while, followed by a short period of rapid "capitalization" upon the breakthrough, followed by longer periods of relative stasis until the next breakthrough. In short, using nothing but random variation and selection, "punctuated equilibrium" occurs automatically as a result of the interplay of chance processes.

I really wish people would bother to learn more about the evolutionary *basics* -- and what's already known about them -- before they go leaping about insisting that there "must" be additional forces at work because they "know" that Darwinian evolution "can't" account for [fill in the blank], and then go flying off in a unicorn hunt.

Can these folks hope to discover new paradigms if they can't even grasp the old one at a basic level of competency?

Behe, Dembski, Spetner, et al -- and almost all of their ID disciples -- may be conversant in their own fields (although frankly I haven't been too impressed with the level of their work even there), but in all honesty they really don't know squat about evolution, despite their self-appointed roles as the leaders of a "new movement" in evolutionary biology. They keep making elementary mistakes that reveal that they don't even have as good a grasp of basic evolutionary fundamentals as the average grad student in some evolution-related discipline.