[allmendream]

My comparison is valid because a submarine must WORK in order to make it into the museum of Naval Warfare History. Can't make history if you don't work. Similarly you only “make it” into the fossil record if there were successful enough as a species to have a few members fossilized.

It is like saying that people in the past were more extraordinary than today, because all the people you read about in history did extraordinary things. Yep, because dull people rarely make history.

There is nothing “random” about a successful body plan. What works is a rather limited subset. Natural selection is in no ways “random”.

[betty boop]

My comparison is valid because a submarine must WORK in order to make it into the museum of Naval Warfare History. Can't make history if you don't work

My point is the submarine is designed to work. That is, it's not the end-product of a virtually endless chain of prior random events that somehow ended up by (serendipitously!) getting it "just right" to do what submarines do.

Surely you can discriminate the difference between "design" and a "crap shoot" that somehow gets things right by accident.