Intended mutations

Crash says you aren't looking at the 99% of species that are extinct. It is far, far, far more extreme than that.Those are the successful species that actually produced a gene pool of some size (be it 10 or 20 individuals). What you need to look at are the percentage of individuals who lived. They weren't aborted in the first few days of development because of a flaw, They weren't still born, they didn't die because of being a bit weak in the first weeks or months. They did out run the predator and they did finally manage to reproduce. I suggest that this % is way, way lower than 1.It is all those trillions and trillions of attempts to get it right but failed that, when winnowed through selection produce such a seemingly "perfect" result.Of course, the results are not perfect at all. They are exactly the results you get when you "design" by trail and error on a massive scale. If you are willing to expend resources on a collosal number of failures you can have some really "original" and surprising results. You also get a huge amount of variety. You also get very complex gludges. That very complexity belies an design by anyone who knew what they were doing.

And that is the point of my post. A very, very large number of "designs" (individual organisms) are so shoddy they don't live to be born. Another large number never reproduce. There ARE a HUGE number of unworking, shoddy designs.If you look at living things you have already filtered out a large number of attempts. They HAVE to be "designs" that are not-to-awful-bad or they are dead. Reality indicates exactly the case that you think should exist if the designs are produced (intially) randomly and then picked if they are "good enough for now". A hugely wasteful process that allows for very, very precise tuning of the few "successful" designs.

This is, of course, off topic here but I don't think it should be ignored.You are, in a way, moving the goalposts now. We are talking about mutations and biological evolution. The discussion is about what is wrong with your consideration of the probability of the life forms we see.However, you are now backing up to, in an analogy with computers, to the origin of the universe. We don't know if the laws which govern the universe had any other possible outcomes nor do we know if we are simple one of many different sets of laws. If some people want to believe that a god set this universe up (built the computer and wrote the software) and let it run to see what would come out (or even knew what would given the initial conditions) there is nothing to disprove that right now. However, that doesn't say anything about the nature of biological evolution.It may be that the originator knew that, eventually, intelligent life would arise in this universe and in that way it is "intended" and all the mutations and selection are just the process used to get to some intelligent life. Fine,if you want to believe that.However, there is no hint whatsoever that any tinkering has gone on since the intial formation of the universe. The method used doesn't need any tinkering either. It can produce some very interesting outcomes left to run on it's own. Just as computer programs left to themselves produce very interesting and sometimes surprising outcomes.The IDists are not putting forward the idea of an 'unintended' universe so they are trying to go further than the science suggests is correct.

Automobiles don't f**k! Analogies don't prove anything but even to be used as an explanation of something they have to match the analogized case in the important ways. You auto analogy fails because it doesn't match biological organisms well enough at all.That this "tornado-in-a-junk-yard" type of analogy keeps cropping up shows the astonishingly weak sort of things that people will fall for.

The eye topic is a little bit related to this topic. It is, as noted, too large to contain within one thread.The topic is discussing how many, many small changes that are filtered can produce an appearence of intentional design. While the eye is a well documented example of this it is larger than needs to be dealt with here.There are other reasons for leaving it out here:
1) You have not demonstrated a grasp of the concepts posted so far in this thread.
2) The development of the eye and reasons for accepting it have been discussed in depth on this site and other places.
3) It is not necessary to pick on a larger example to discuss the issues.

It is, as I said, related but it is almost certainly going to turn into a red herring that will take everyone off for 50 or more posts. That is the major reason for wanting to avoid it here.The others are as noted above. The concept being discussed can be handled with smaller scale examples.