Animals with bad design.

Surely an all knowing, all powerful deity could create an active and mobile photosynthetic organism.

That's a poor question. A burned out TV can function as a boat anchor, but that doesn't mean it is designed to be a boat anchor. A broken keyboard can act as a hammer, but that doesn't mean that it is designed to be a hammer. A pelvis is designed to carry the weight of a tetrapod.

Which mutations are observed to be non-random with respect to fitness? Epigenetics does not involve mutation of DNA sequence. On top of that, epigenetics can not explain the differences seen between species (e.g. the differences between humans and chimps).

Organisms break down all of the time, and well short of the 5 million year mark. I think they call it "death". In fact, the average car well outlasts a goldfish, as one example. What definition of perfection were you using? Like others have said, if both good design and bad design are evidence of God then you are pushing a dogmatic belief, not a testable scientific hypothesis. In a well designed world there wouldn't be a need for an exchange of nutrients amongst biological life. Not if they were perfectly designed. I know that when I grow cells at the wrong temperature and conditions and they all die my boss usually blames me.

Perhaps it would be a good time to remind everyone of the definition that Charles Darwin used:"An organ serving for two purposes, may become rudimentary or utterly aborted for one, even the more important purpose, and remain perfectly efficient for the other.... "The whale pelvis no longer serves it's primary function. It no longer serves as an anchoring point for the hind limb which propels the organism. The whale pelvis no longer helps to bear the weight of the organism. The only function that the whale pelvis has is to serve as a rudimentary anchoring point for muscles. So yes, the whale pelvis is vestigial even if it does have a rudimentary function compared to homologous structures in other species.I also used non-biological examples in past posts. Most would say that a TV with a 5 bullet holes through the tube is useless. However, it could be used as a boat anchor so it does have function. Does this mean that the bullet ridden TV is a good design for a boat anchor just because it can act as a boat anchor?

No it is not. It is a well defined term that is applicable to many things outside and within biology.A bullet ridden TV can serve as a rudimentary boat anchor.A keyboard missing half of it's keys can still function as a rudimentary hammer.Neither keyboards nor TV's evolved, and yet the term works perfectly to describe each situation. No, I wouldn't. Wings have a very important primary function for which they are well adapted. Using the examples above, would you say that projecting a transmitted picture is a rudimentary function of a TV since it is not involved as a boat anchor?What you need to look at is homologous structures and how those structures relate to fitness. For example, (most) birds share a homologous wing structure. From this we can deduce that the features of the wing are adapted for flight. However, in the ostrich, emu, and rhea we see the same structures but no flight. We can find other functions for the wings in these species, but they are rudimentary functions compared to the function of the same feature in other birds. The wings of ostriches, emus, and rheas is equivalent to using a bullet ridden TV as a boat anchor. Ding ding ding ding ding. We have a winner.That's exactly it. This is true of the ostrich wing, whale pelvis, human vermiform appendix, human coccyx, and a ton of other vestigial structures we can point to. Not uselessly, as the TV boat anchor shows. Each part in the TV adds weight and is therefore useful for keeping the boat in place. Try again.Edited by Taq, : No reason given.

The chicken wing and whale forelimb are not very different structures. They share a lot of homology, the same homology shared by all vertebrate tetrapods. It is the same analysis that allows me to deduce that every human has a bone called a humerus that attaches their arm to their torso. It's called homology. Can you name a homologous structure found in whales that is not seen in any mammal but is found in other animal groups? Mind you, I said homologous, not analogous.From everything I have read, whales do not just have mammalian features. It is much more than that. As it turns out, whales are mammals. Surely a design with gills would make much more sense. Being able to extract much needed oxygen from the environment in which you live seems like a big improvement over the current model. Even modern submarines use electrolysis to extract oxygen from the surrounding water. If this isn't a good design then it only indicates that fish are poorly designed. Pick your poison.

So you are telling us that an all knowing and all powerful supernatural deity who lives outside of space and time could not come up with a way for whales to extract oxygen from the water they live in, even though this same deity was able to do it for fish? When you make a vase you don't make a teapot first and then take the spout and handle off. So you are telling us that an all powerful and all knowing supernatural deity could not figure out a way to align the mesoderm properly without first giving the whale embryo leg buds that will never develop into legs? That is still a vestigial function. Both of which are vestigial functions. This is like using an extra transmission as the back seat of a car.

The empirical method is to compare the same features between two species and to compare this to phylogenetic relationships. For whales, the pelvis is vestigial because the pelvis supports the weight of the animal on land in the whales' closest cousins and in it's ancestors. The theory of evolution makes specific predictions as they relate to vestigial structures. For example, you should not find a species with feathers and vestigial nipples or a fish with vestigial patches of fur. The vestigial structures should fall into the nested hierarchy predicted by the theory, and they do.The same applies for embryonic atavisms. You should not see mammal embryos start to grow a beak and then reabsorb it. All of the atavisms fall into the expected lines of descent. False. All you need to do is compare the functions between species. The human appendix is vestigial because it does not function as part of a caecum used in digesting plant matter. This is true whether or not evolution is true.

A real theory is able to tell us what should and should not exist. It would appear that intelligent design is not able to do this. The problem is that a "right mix" is a self fulfilling prophesy, if you will. Species that do not fit in well with a food chain tend to die off leaving the species who do fit in. We can look through the history of life of on Earth and find many extinction events, the most recent being the death of megafauna (e.g. mammoths) after the last ice age. Food chains are always in flux and find stability through the extinction of species or the evolution of species into a new niche. Why would an omnipotent and omniscient deity need to put a tail on a fetus only to have it reabsorbed?As to nature, the process of evolution is blind to the specific steps in embryology. Evolution only selects adaptations of the post-natal organism. It is not surprising at all that evolution would rely on Rube Goldberg-like mechanisms. Evolution doesn't produce the "best" arrangement of pieces. It produces arrangements that are good enough.