Doesn't Natural Selection lead to Specified Complexity?

Yes and no. There are some mutations that make no changes in function or phenotype (e.g. synonymous mutations). There are also mutations that produce changes in phenotype but such changes do not result in a change in fitness. In the latter case the environment does play a role in determining selective pressure and the prevalence of a trait. OR . . . . evolution is a designer. That always confuses the ID supporters.

You need to carefully parse what I said. I stated that the environment determines which changes are under selective pressure. The environment determines which mutations are under negative, positive, or neutral selection. I am relating all of this back to a previous post where you stated:"Drift is not a function of the environment (if I understand the term correctly) since the prevalence of that 'trait' is not dependent on environment (if it were it would be bound up in the natural selection)."The environment does determine which mutations are neutral, and therefore determines the probability of that trait being passed on to the next generation.

Drift is a mathematical model which describes the spread of mutations that do not affect fitness in a given environment. Which mutations are neutral is a function of the environment just like the environment determines which mutations are beneficial and which are detrimental. Natural selection is never deterministic. It is always probabilistic. The game of craps is a good analogy. You have the highest probability of rolling a 7 on any given roll, but this doesn't mean that you will roll a 2 or 12 occasionally. The same for selection. Sometimes beneficial mutations are not passed on, and other times detrimental mutations are passed on. For beneficial mutations the odds are in their favor while the odds are against detrimental mutations. For neutral mutations there are even odds. All mutations fall somewhere in this spectrum.

Yes, it is. The effect that a mutation has on fitness is determined by the environment, and this includes neutral effects. A mutation conferring antibiotic resistance in an environment with antibiotics is a beneficial mutation. If antibiotics are removed from the environment then that mutation may very well become neutral or slightly detrimental. It is the environment which determines this.

How can you determine if a mutation is neutral without first having the environment interact with the population through evolutionary mechanisms? The specification in ID rhetoric is nothing more than a sharpshooter fallacy. They draw a bull's eye around the arrow, or in the case of the actual biological systems they draw the bull's eye around the current DNA sequence.As to complexity, this is exactly what we would expect to see in a top-down design process like evolution. You are bound to produce Rube Goldberg mechanisms when the design process is blind to the actual specifics of the design. The sign of intelligent design is often simplicity, not complexity.

These mutations do react with the environment whether or not there are antibiotics present. These mutations occur in proteins that are involved in protein synthesis, cell wall catabolism, etc. Netrality is determined by whether or not these interactions result in a change in fitness.

It is the relationship between the mutation and the environment which determines if a mutation is neutral, beneficial, or detrimental. There is no way to determine if a mutation is neutral without observation of how that mutation relates to the environment. There is always a relationship between DNA sequence and environment. Exactly.

They are not the same thing. There is no relationship between a mutation that occurs in an ostrich and deep sea environments because an ostrich does not live in a deep sea environment. However, each and every mutation that occurs in an ostrich offspring (including neutral ones) have a relationship with the environment they do live in. For neutral mutations, this relationship causes the ratio of neutral mutations to stay the same on average. Natural selection is all about the probability of a mutation being passed on. For neutral mutations, natural selection produces a 50-50 probability.

All population genetics assume an ideal population. A neutral mutation has the same chance of being linked to a detrimental or beneficial allele so the it does average out to 50-50 for all neutral mutations in an ideal population. I have addressed this quite a few times. This is false. It is the relationship between the mutation and the environment that determines the effect on fitness, even if that effect results in no net change. Right. So the neutrality of a mutation is determined by the relationship between the mutation and the environment that the organism is in.