So your an Athiest

[Esquilax]

You say that life doesn't reflect intelligent design. Flaws in what way?

Well, okay, just off the top of my head, the nerves in the human back are arranged pretty terribly for a bipedal animal- the reason you get pinched nerves and a whole lot of nerve-related back pains is due to this- but they're arranged just so for forward sloping quadrupedal movement like the other great apes, which is kind of a weird thing for a designer to do if they knew we'd be walking upright. Our eyes could be improved nearly across the board by simply shucking the plan that we have and replicating the squid eye, and frankly it's completely ridiculous that you have two organs that you think are designed to do the exact same thing, yet are completely different designs where one is objectively worse, and those designs just so happen to align with established patterns of evolutionary divergence. You could eliminate a whole lot of arthritis and joint based problems simply by reversing the joint on our knee.

And hey, if every living creature is designed then why does the giraffe have a circuitous, looped nerve in its neck where a straight line could easily be implemented? Why do whales have tiny little vestigial leg bones inside the flesh of their abdomen? Why do flightless birds have wings? I could go on, but the fact is, if each of these organisms is intelligently designed then these clear, obvious flaws wouldn't exist, or else you've got a severely inept designer, or one attempting to make it look as though these things evolved naturally without any design.

You say you think life reflects what you would expect to see if the only thing being acted upon was the organisms ability to survive, yet life has many features that go beyond the basics of survival and reproduction.

Sure, but you're misunderstanding me: things evolve via random mutations, so of course there are going to be elements of life that aren't strictly for survival. What I'm saying is that those things do not behave as though they were designed, rather like they had come into existence randomly and been intensified or removed based on how well that organism survives and reproduces, without thought to the comfort of the organism or the efficacy of the feature. Like the giraffe example from earlier: long necked giraffes survived better, and so the long necked gene got passed on, which eventually gave giraffes long necks without care for how a long neck could best serve them, which is why they've got long necks but a laryngeal nerve that loops around itself uselessly, because the nerve extended to keep up with the giraffe's evolving neck, instead of being designed that way by a sensible intelligence.

 Life has tremendous complexity and amazing specifically functioning systems in the cell: the communication via signal transduction pathways, genes regulating other genes (try to explain that one with evolution), and molecular machines that are necessary but not sufficient for life. Evolution explains the addition of new genetic information poorly.

Evolution explains it sufficiently: mutations occur in such a way that DNA sequences are replicated redundantly and changed all the time, which is by all accounts new information. There's simply no need to posit an intelligence to resolve this, given that all you have to go on is cherry-picked examples of complexity, a willingness to ignore those areas that seem to contradict your conclusion, and observations that are consistent with design without being indications of it.

Besides which, "evolution explains this poorly," is not a reason to accept the design conclusion. It's just an argument from ignorance: if evolution didn't explain it at all, you would have no better reason to accept design without evidence of design. Positive evidence, not just intuitively consistent observations that have other, more parsimonious explanations.

Point mutations are so infrequent that to expect them to compile themselves in the necessary order to form a new gene without at any point crippling the organism's ability to survive is unrealistic. Other forms of mutation such as recombination events are still not adding new information, they are just rearranging and modifying pre-existing information. 

So, I have to ask: why do you think "information" is a concept that is at all relevant to this discussion? Information is an inherently conceptual thing, it is nothing more than order retroactively identified in a pre-existing state by subjective human experience, it's not some objectively real quantity, certainly not something required for life to exist. It's just a pattern that we see afterward, made into an arbitrary label by creationists so they could have an objection to evolution. It doesn't actually matter to a discussion of genetics.

Evolution is not readily demonstrable, and to say that it is so is spreading ignorance.

You can see it happening in the lab across multiple species, both naturally and at the behest of human experimentation. It's readily demonstrable in that what the process actually describes can be seen and caused to happen by human intervention, and it's only by scrabbling to redefine the term away from what the term means that you can get to a state that's not "readily demonstrable."

If we can see bacteria evolving the capacity to digest a compound that they demonstrably did not have the ability to do so in earlier generations, then I no longer need to hear this lie that it's not demonstrable.

Sure changes occur, but point me to one increase in complexity.

Bacteria evolving the ability to digest nylon over generations. Skinks in Australia evolving the ability to hatch live births in addition to laying eggs. Italian Wall Lizards evolving entirely new digestive structures never before seen in the species, in an isolated, introduced population, in order to function with a changed diet. All new abilities, including new physiological structures, making the animals more complex.

Now in return, I'd like you to point me to a single mainstream definition of evolution that specifies that it only counts as evolving if the organism increases in complexity. I'll wait.

I think the genome is decreasing in functionality because virtually all diseases are the result of mutations arising in protein coding sequences of the genome resulting in a defective genome. Diseases are increasing in the population (partially due to poor lifestyle, but also due to defective alleles becoming more common). 

But not all diseases are permanent, or inflict permanent damage. That's a highly specious claim you're making there.

I'll attempt to define biological information: Irregular sequential organization of monomers, that have no chemical preference for their order, that exist in a way that allows them to accomplish a complex set of goals.

Which only leads to a further question: how did you determine that there were any pre-existing goals present at all?

Moreover, aren't you just attempting to define a problem into existence by arbitrarily attaching a label laden with self serving implications onto an already extant phenomena for no reason at all?