Reply #19: To me, present day life is too complicated for any intelligence to design

[seleff]

I guess as an agnostic I do not acknowledge infinite intelligence to any "being".

I can and have made recombinant viruses from existing genetic material, but it's recombination and selection ("microevolution") that allowed me to pick out the virus we wanted for experimentation. We injected these viruses into animals to effect changes in their physiology and/or behavior (correct an experimentally made lesion or inbred genetic defect). But it's simply fantasy (AKA "faith") to imagine the enterprise that would be required to just go out and design the diversity of life. Time and change is the only way I can see the diversity evolving, based on the rules and forces we fleetingly understand about chemical and physical properties of matter and how systems begin to interact and behave in isolation and en masse.

I watched some Gifted HS students I worked with last summer play around with a program called "the game of Life". A few simple rules set on iterations of "cell-cell" interactions over time and one could see the development of semi-stable and stable fractal patterns develop that to me resembled the kinds of organogenesis one sees in time lapse studies in real developing organisms (apparently zebrafish are the recent hot organisms because you can literally watch vertebrate development in a reasonably short time (hours-days-weeks).

Behe's book is the only ID stuff I've read. His arguments resemble those that would have earned at best a C in an upper division biology class even in the 70s. His misunderstanding and ignorance of modern molecular/cell biology and genetics is stunning for someone with a University Faculty position. But then again, I'm not surprised that LeHigh University has dead wood. Most Universities, even first and second tier ones have them.