Animals with bad design.

So the concept of Intelligent Design won't work unless the design is flawed. The next question is: Does it take an "intelligent" designer to balance all of those flaws or just an incompetent boob?

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"I'm Rory Bellows, I tell you! And I got a lot of corroborating evidence... over here... by the throttle!"

Ever hear of salt water?

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"I'm Rory Bellows, I tell you! And I got a lot of corroborating evidence... over here... by the throttle!"

I think Aaron was just a bit careless with the scales. We've had the metric system in Canada for more than thirty years and people of my generation still use Fahrenheit and Celsius in the same sentence. I assumed he meant 0 Celsius.

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"I'm Rory Bellows, I tell you! And I got a lot of corroborating evidence... over here... by the throttle!"

I don't think he was suggesting that whales can swim in ice. There's no need to assume duplicity when simple carelessness is more likely.

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"I'm Rory Bellows, I tell you! And I got a lot of corroborating evidence... over here... by the throttle!"

It would also be unintelligent to fit tiny wheels on a submarine.Vestigial wheels would suggest that the submarine had evolved from a land vehicle.

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"I'm Rory Bellows, I tell you! And I got a lot of corroborating evidence... over here... by the throttle!"

But why put the echolocation option in only some of the animals that need it? That's like putting headlights on certain models of cars but not on others.Evolution suggests that organisms with a "special ability" move into niches where they can exploit that ability. When Henry Ford saw that compact cars with headlights were useful for pizza delivery, he realized that four-door sedans with headlights would also be useful as taxis.A good salesman might try to sell you one car for daytime and one for night but a good designer would provide an option for both.Edited by ringo, : Spellind and minor changes in order word.Edited by ringo, : Added clever subtitle.

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"I'm Rory Bellows, I tell you! And I got a lot of corroborating evidence... over here... by the throttle!"

I specifically said "tiny" wheels, analogous to a whale's tiny legs. To follow the analogy through, the wheels would be entirely inside the submarine. It doesn't matter whether they're useful for a hatrack. No intelligent designer would do such a thing. He'd make a proper hatrack.

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You can have brevity and clarify, or you can have accuracy and detail, but you can't easily have both. --Percy

That's what I said. In order for the system to work, each individual part of that system has to have a flaw, a weakness, an imperfection that forces it to pass on its energy to another part of the sytem.The question is: How do you tell a system that was designed to be flawed in "perfect balance" from one that evolved haphazardly? The fact of extinctions seems to answer that question. If it was designed by a perfect being, it ought to be perfect. Again, the designer you're describing seems to be no improvement on the messy results that we'd expect from evolution. If he exists, so what?

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You can have brevity and clarify, or you can have accuracy and detail, but you can't easily have both. --Percy

That's what makes it good science. The inability of DNA to replicate perfectly, along with the natural selection of "improvements" over "mistakes", makes diversity inevitable.The design hypothesis, on the other hand, only allows for the possibility of diversity. It can't predict anything. Design advocates can never know why the designer gave bats, humans and whales the same hands for very different environments. The theory of evolution predicts that descendants of a common ancestor will branch out to fill environmental niches, which explains the hands nicely. Sure you would. You'd predict that, given the appropriate conditions, atoms would react to form anything that is made of atoms.

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You can have brevity and clarify, or you can have accuracy and detail, but you can't easily have both. --Percy

That isn't intelligent design; it's malicious design. A perfect booby-trap may refute the "bad design" thesis but it isn't something I'd brag about.

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You can have brevity and clarify, or you can have accuracy and detail, but you can't easily have both. --Percy

Yes, that's what we'd expect from evolution - different, not necessarily additional. But we wouldn't expect a competent designer to build in "devolution".

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You can have brevity and clarify, or you can have accuracy and detail, but you can't easily have both. --Percy

Then how do you explain all of the extinct species? They failed to adapt to their environment."Inbuilt reducing versatility" can only account for different species moving into different niches. It can't account for adaptation to changes in those niches.If species evolved naturally, we'd expect a lot of the "accidental" changes to fail, which is exactly what we see. If they were designed to fail, that's bad design.

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If you have nothing to say, you could have done so much more concisely. -- Dr Adequate

I don't know why that keeps coming up. It isn't a "loss" of information; it's a change of information. You don't need new words to write a different book. You just have to arrange the existing words in a different order.Edited by ringo, : Removed shopworn subtitle.

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If you have nothing to say, you could have done so much more concisely. -- Dr Adequate