Doesn't Natural Selection lead to Specified Complexity?

I don't really see this. Genes that have a selective benefit or detriment can still be subject to genetic drift, otherwise all beneficial mutations would be maintained in populations once they arose, which would make the effects of selection for a given allele in a given environment truly deterministic. The stochastic forces that produce genetic drift can affect any allele.Drift is an effect of essentially random sampling with regard to allelic fitness. The tack you are taking seems to take the contextual nature of mutations to a ludicrous extreme such that the fitness of any allele would be determined by the specific situation of the individual organism carrying it. So any allele of an organism that died before reproducing would have a neutral fitness. But these are population genetics concepts and they only really work in terms of populations.There are no 'mutations responsible for drift', drift is not a mutational phenomenon it is a phenomenon of random sampling. Mutation simply creates the alleles, whatever their fitness, upon which drift and selection operate.TTFN,WK

There aren't any alleles responsible for drift either. My whole point was that the fitness of any given allele is incidental to drift, drift occurs regardless of the fitness of alleles. Drift and selection are two separate factors that can work independently, in accord or in competition to alter the frequency of alleles in a population.If you are trying to say that genetic variation, i.e. more than one allele, is required for drift or selection to operate then of course I agree. In a perfectly homogeneous population there will be no effect from drift or selection and a de novo mutation will be required before they can operate. Is that your point? I'm not that smart but I'll try my best to compete, 'never knowingly under nit-picked' that's my motto.TTFN,WK

While the general concept of 'survival of the fittest' may be broad, the exact adaptations that confer fitness in a given context can be quite specific. A lot of us would agree with you, but it is a figment created by IDists suited to produce a need for the very sort of intelligent agency you suggest. This would be a good time to show some evidence suggesting this. The vast majority of evidence shows that the mechanisms creating genetic variation, basically the various different forms of mutation, are not very specific at all and that the principle constraints are applied post hoc by natural selection. For example look at experiments for the evolution of bacterial resistance where the trait can be shown to arise in cultures not exposed to the antibiotic in line with the frequency expectations of random mutation.TTFN,WK

Well as I said, the mechanisms aren't specific some of the resulting adaptational outcomes are however. So you may be right that systems created by an intelligent agent tend to be specific, but if so then we have considerable evidence that the results of mutation and selection are exceptions to this overall trend. Not a contradiction at all, the adaptive mutations that confer fitness may be specific but the mechanisms by which they arise, principally random mutation, are non-specific. It is the environment with which the various genomes interact that imposes apparent specificity on the varieties that thrive, after they have arisen, through differential reproductive success.So multiple entirely maladaptive or non-adaptive variants are being produced at the same time as adaptive variants, but the particular pattern in which they are retained in the gene pool is heavily influenced by the specific environment in which they exist. What I'm saying is that most of the people who talk about specified complexity are IDists, it isn't a widely used concept in evolutionary biology. And the reason they do is to use the term specification to insert a requirement for an intelligent agency, exactly the same argument you are trying to make. They use similar approaches talking about genetic information, Werner Gitt has a definition of information which explicitly requires it to have a mental origin, thoroughly stacking the deck in favour of intelligent agency again. How on earth is that specific? The same mechanisms can usually be found outside of that taxonomic group as well, unless you are basing you taxonomy solely on such mechanisms.It would help if you yourself were more specific, after all a taxonomic 'group' could be anything from a subspecies to a kingdom or even a domain. Well it can but most of the evidence suggests that in general it doesn't. We can change an organisms DNA significantly and see no obvious effects on its viability while on the other hand there are some single nucleotide mutations which are lethal at very early stages of embryonic development.So again it is hard to see where this suggests any particular specificity in the mechanisms giving rise to the mutations. Again some evidence and some speciicity on your part would be good. I'm not even sure what 'mechanisms' you are talking about now, you seem to be using the term interchangeably for both the systems originating the mutations and the systems resulting from mutation and selection.TTFN,WK