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To: RogueIsland
No, the problem with that explanation is that it assumes that not only was that biodiversity created through some sort of genetic engineering, that genetic engineering was carried out so that it looks exactly as if evolution had actually produced the results.

That is an interesting reversal of description in the history of this debate. It seems to me that much of Darwinian explanatory efforts have been aimed at explaining how things that look designed really aren't.

The world is divided into things that look designed (like birds and airliners) and things that don't (rocks and mountains). Things that look designed are divided into those that really are designed (submarines and tin openers) and those that aren't (sharks and hedgehogs). The diagnostic of things that look (or are) designed is that their parts are assembled in ways that are statistically improbable in a functional direction. They do something well: for instance, fly.

Darwinian natural selection can produce an uncanny illusion of design. An engineer would be hard put to decide whether a bird or a plane was the more aerodynamically elegant.

So powerful is the illusion of design, it took humanity until the mid-19th century to realise that it is an illusion. In 1859, Charles Darwin announced one of the greatest ideas ever to occur to a human mind: cumulative evolution by natural selection. Living complexity is indeed orders of magnitude too improbable to have come about by chance. But only if we assume that all the luck has to come in one fell swoop. When cascades of small chance steps accumulate, you can reach prodigious heights of adaptive complexity. That cumulative build-up is evolution. Its guiding force is natural selection....
The World's ten Biggest Ideas Richard Dawkins, New Scientist (September 2005)

When I see something that looks like an outboard motor my first thought is NOT that it looks like the cumulative result of an un-engineered process of random copying errors.

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Cordially,

334 posted on 10/10/2005 10:21:41 AM PDT by Diamond (Qui liberatio scelestus trucido inculpatus.)
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To: Diamond
Of course it doesn't LOOK like that. You've got a schematic diagram. DNA LOOKS like Tinkertoys when you make your model out of Tinkertoys.
336 posted on 10/10/2005 10:27:49 AM PDT by js1138 (Great is the power of steady misrepresentation.)
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To: Diamond
Darwinian natural selection can produce an uncanny illusion of design. An engineer would be hard put to decide whether a bird or a plane was the more aerodynamically elegant.

Which just goes to show that Mr. Dawkins is not an engineer. Real engineers know that birds are far more aerodynamically elegant.

340 posted on 10/10/2005 11:03:00 AM PDT by r9etb
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