Reply #32: you're basically pointing out the existence of complex biological systems

[treepig]

that are not currently understood - and then using this current lack of knowledge to attempt to undermine the "theory of evolution."

consider something that surely has an exact biological basis - the conversion of sound waves into sounds that we hear. what is now known is that there are thousands of neurons involved in complex signal processing events that allow sounds to be heard. what is not known is exactly (or even approximately) how they all work together to do so. does this lack of knowledge mean that there is no biological basis for hearing - well, no more than saying my lack of understanding of how, when i hit a key on my keyboard and a representation of a letter magically appears on the screen, means that there is no electronic/mechanical basis for these correlated events. similarly, just because we currently lack an understanding of the biological basis of love and spirituality doesn't mean that there isn't one.

getting back to the "theory" of evolution, surely you're aware that in this context the work "theory" doesn't imply any doubt as to the veracity of the concept. perhaps a refresher from http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=000D4FEC-7D5B-1D07-8E49809EC588EEDF&catID=2 would help?

"Many people learned in elementary school that a theory falls in the middle of a hierarchy of certainty--above a mere hypothesis but below a law. Scientists do not use the terms that way, however. According to the National Academy of Sciences (NAS), a scientific theory is "a well-substantiated explanation of some aspect of the natural world that can incorporate facts, laws, inferences, and tested hypotheses." No amount of validation changes a theory into a law, which is a descriptive generalization about nature. So when scientists talk about the theory of evolution--or the atomic theory or the theory of relativity, for that matter--they are not expressing reservations about its truth."

and the example of woodpeckers acting in a manner that is difficult to explain based on the principles of natural selection seems to miss a major point of the "theory" of evolution. integral to evolution is the fact that Nature has provided a ready means (DNA damage) to bring about genetic diversity (DNA mutations) as a prelude to where natural selection kicks in. therefore whenever a population is observed over a short period of time, there are bound to be some (or many) individuals with recently derived mutations that lead to traits that will not stand the test of time. in fact, almost all newly-arising genetic diversity is deleterious and will be eliminated from the population in the long term. however this diversity is absolutely required for the rare instances when the environment demands change - an example is the light colored moths that used to live on light colored english trees before the industrial revolution. any dark colored moths were quickly spotted by birds an eaten - in fact the existence of such "unfit" moths provided a nice example to dispute darwin's theories. however, after soot from factories during the industrial revolution darkened all the trees, suddenly the dark colored moths were the ones that came to dominate the population because the light colored suddenly became "unfit" thereby clearly illustrating the usefulness (or rather, the necessity) of seemingly worthless genetic diversity.