Arguments against Design (General)

by dhw, Thursday, July 30, 2009, 10:18 (5593 days ago) @ George Jelliss

George: In future I'm going to have to limit myself to certain threads...There have been just too many posts to follow lately, and they often veer wildly off topic! - That's why I tried so hard (but so unsuccessfully) to sort out the evolution thread. I understand completely, and remain immensely grateful to you for your always invaluable contributions. - You've raised another important issue here: "I don't see why any special "mechanism" is necessary. Variation will occur quite naturally, sometimes it will be reproducible sometimes not." - Nice and easy when it's all done for you. Imagine trying to devise such a mechanism yourself from scratch. A self-replicating machine would be difficult enough to design (we still can't do it), but how would you set about ensuring that changes to the mechanism did not automatically make it break down? And yet the replicas of this self-made machine not only survive changes, they actually in some cases benefit from them and also reproduce them. If you were designing the mechanism, you would soon find out that replication will not "naturally" allow for variation. You would have to build that in as an additional function.