Towards a Hypothesis of Molecular Design

Hi Genonicus,Your post assumes but does not describe your view of how the intelligent designer operates, so tell me if these steps are roughly correct:

1. A new form for an existing organism is conceived.
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2. The DNA, proteins and other elements for the organism's new form are designed.
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3. A plan of action is composed by which the current DNA will be changed into the new DNA. I'm not clear on whether changing the DNA would be a single step or a series of steps.
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4. The existing population is surveyed and candidate organisms are chosen for the DNA change.
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5. The change is made in the candidate organisms' reproductive DNA, and their offspring receive the new DNA. In sexual populations issues of dominance and recessiveness come into play, so the changes would have to be seeded into some appropriately larger number of individuals than in a non-sexual population.
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6. The population is subsequently monitored to see the actual effect of the genetic change, and to make sure the change does propagate through the population. The desired change may not have been achieved, or chance mating choices may not have resulted in propagation, so there may have to be followup actions that repeat some or all of the above steps.

Even if intelligent design engineers are responsible for only 1% of all genetic changes, given the number of species on Earth and the time periods involved this is a massive task requiring the coordinated activity of at least millions of individuals full time. We shouldn't have to be looking into our microscopes for evidence of their presence. Their garbage dumps alone should be everywhere.And why are they doing this? How did they get here? Where are they hiding?And more importantly, how did the intelligent designer evolve?Sorry to have ignored the specifics in your post, but it seems to me that you've skipped over a lot of obvious issues to jump way down into a fantasy of detail.--Percy

Hi Genomicus,The steps I described assumed your hypothesis was that significant evolutionary steps are carried out by designing the necessary DNA and then inserting it into the reproductive cells of existing lifeforms on Earth. This would, of course, be a labor intensive effort requiring continuous activity (including up through the present) that would leave behind a great deal of evidence.The steps you described seem more consistent with a hypothesis that the first life was designed, manufactured and seeded on to Earth, and that evolution took over after that. The possibility that life was seeded here from somewhere else is already an accepted hypothesis, but your hypothesis introduces the additional idea that it was designed and manufactured rather than natural.This raises the obvious conundrum that if the origin of life on Earth required a designer, then the origin of life on the designer's home planet also required a designer, and the origin of life on the designer's designer's home planet also required a designer, and so forth ad infinitum. To break the conundrum one must accept that although Earth lacks the necessary qualities for abiogenesis, there must have been at least one planet where life arose naturally, and that life on one of these planets must be the ultimate origin of life here.But why do you believe life couldn't have arisen naturally here on Earth, but could have arisen naturally elsewhere? There must be a compelling reason to believe this (and interstellar travel, too) in order to justify the amount of intellectual effort it would take to understand the details of your proposal.It just seems to me that before discussing how many fairies can dance on the head of a pin, one must have a compelling reason for believing fairies exist.--Percy