Intelligent Design: Did you design yourself?

[Mister Agenda]

Who is to say the bacteria flagellum wasn't designed? Just because a pathway was found that showed it could have evolved doesn't mean that it did evolve.

Do you know what 'irreducibly complex' means?

There is nothing wrong with asking students to look at a feature of the universe and ask, "is this better explained by intelligent cause or an unintelligent cause?" This is a perfectly valid line of inquiry.

Unless you're talking about graduate research students, they have enough to do learning the material without having to reinvent the wheel pursuing redundant lines of inquiry. It's science class, not philosophy class.

You are confusing species with lineage. There is only one known lineage of life on this planet(two if you count mycoplasma laboratorium as a separate lineage....I do not because I see it as a modification of existing life). All life shares a universal common ancestor. Once we start creating biological life from scratch(instead of cobbling it together frakenstien style) there will be several lineages.

That's a pretty useless usage of 'lineage'. Every single synthesized nucleus would be a new lineage if you stick with common descent as the criteria, but we won't be generating new genetic information just for the fun of it. It will be long, difficult work to make a variation distinct enough from the existing lineage that you can tell it's artificial without 'water marks'. The vast majority of new species we create, especially over the next 40 years, will be modifications of existing genetic information, even if we build the germ cells from scratch, and without watermarks would appear to a geneticist as belonging to the same lineage as other life on earth.

We've got two new 'letters' for DNA, but building a genome that functions out of them rather than just inserting them here and there is incredibly daunting.

This is just a difference of opinion on how fast things are going to change, and not that germane to the main issues at hand. I could certainly be underestimating how quickly things will change.

---

Big negative.

I advance the claim that natural organism could be intelligently designed. I don't believe they are, but I acknowledge they could be. I also believe it is a perfectly valid line of inquiry to look for evidence of such design and that such inquiry is still science even if it turns out to be fruitless.