All good points, bb.
Obsolete submarines are recorded by the droves....even the Merrimac & Monitor.
And obsolete animals are recorded in the fossil record in droves as well. But they were successful FOR THEIR TIME.
Simply no market for a marsupial tiger anymore. They are obsolete, as well as extinct.
Yes — and Merrimac & Monitor would be "fossils" of the species "submarines."
But this does nothing to detract from the fact that every member of the class "submarines" is a purpose-built machine, constructed by an intelligent, creative agent.
A typhoon blowing through a junk yard cannot construct a Boeing 737 no matter how much time is "available" for this process. Especially because there's nothing to "tell" the process how it could ever know whether it had achieved its purpose (construction of a Boeing 737); i.e., whether the process was successful or not.
No purpose can be invoked by a "random" process. Indeed, the specification of "randomness" is usually made when the idea of "purpose" in nature enters the public debate/discussion. The advocates of randomness purport to show the unshowable: that an ordered system can emerge without prior reference to a functional purpose. They think they can dispense with purpose in nature altogether.
allmendream didn't specifically answer my question as to whether "random mutation" has been morphed into "genetic variation" as the proper language to use nowadays. Yet he clearly deemphasizes the use of the word, random, in descriptions of biology. Though that's the very language that Darwin used.
And moreover, is the language still used by some of the most eminent biologists of recent times. For instance, the Nobel prize-winning biologist Jacques Monod, who insists that everything we see all around us in nature, biological and otherwise, is the product of "sheer, blind chance."
I dunno, xzins. Seems to me if a claim like that were true, it would refer to a process nothing short of the miraculous. For a chain of accidents is to be credited with the order of the natural world. On this principle, order rises, spontaneously you see, from disorder.
But jeepers, when exactly did Darwinists start believing in miracles like this?