So your an Athiest

[Esquilax]

Yes we do get back pains, but the reality is that our species takes very poor care of its body, so we can't blame all physiological problems that we encounter on our basal anatomy.

We can blame the ones I listed on our anatomy, though:it's just objectively true that our nerves in that area are better suited to the motion of the other great apes, and that there are superior nerve setups for bipedal motion that are not present in humans. Even a person in perfect physical health will still fall victim to the back problems I'm talking about with age, this is specifically a set of problems caused by the placement of the nerves, not the well being of the person.

 I'll make a prediction now that says that if we give our bodies proper nutrition and use all muscle groups on a regular basis, our bodies will regulate themselves remarkably well and take care of the problems it encounters.

Not these problems. People get paralyzed over this, through no fault of their own.

Also sometimes design must compromise. The idea is that you increase all the variables in a system to the highest point that they can be without decreasing the function of others. For example, you want to build the best ship possible. You could make it smaller and lighter and it would be faster. You could make it bigger and heavier to enable it to carry more. You could make it wider to make it rock less. You could improve its shape to make it sail more smoothly. You can only improve one variable so much before it starts to negatively affect the system as a whole. You could make the most optimal ship for all the variables, but you could still build a faster ship. Or a sturdier ship. You get the idea? I'm not saying that this is always the case in anatomy, but I believe it is true to an extent.

This isn't really relevant to these cases, though. Reverse-jointed knees wouldn't require any subtraction to our bodily fitness but would improve our susceptibility to arthritic conditions immediately. Simply adjusting the placement of the nerves in our spine would help with back problems without needing to alter the physical matter at all. Replacing our eyes with squid eyes would be much the same. This isn't a case of balancing pros and cons, it's a case of cons existing where they don't need to.

The giraffe thing is interesting. However, I have to ask if you have ever dissected a cadaver and looked its nervous system? I have, and take my word (or don't, idc) for it; you don't usually see nerves that don't branch off many times along the way. I'll make another prediction that it branches off several times to allow it to regulate multiple areas and a straight nerve from one location to the ending location would not allow it to regulate them.

Nope. In this case I'm talking about a specific nerve, the laryngeal nerve, which humans have too, that regulates all the musculature in the larynx. A ton of different animals have this, and in mammals, due to the way our head and necks are set up, the nerve sort of loops under the aortic arch lower down, descending from the brain into the chest cavity before rising back up to the larynx. In most mammals that's like a few inches of distance so it's not a problem, though it does demonstrate how stupidly the neck evolved, since such a nerve could easily just have had a detour directly down to the throat if it were designed, but since it evolved gradually in concert with the neck and the aortas, it just goes on a journey with them instead of doing the smart thing.

However, giraffes face no such problem, since their brain is in no way on the wrong side of the aortic arch, and there's no obstruction for it to pass through or around to get to the larynx. The nerve could make a couple inch journey to the larynx from the brain, but instead of just doing that, it takes a fifteen foot ride down the entirety of the neck, into the chest cavity, around the aortic arch, and then back up the neck and into the larynx. There is no benefit to this route, the nerve only does the one thing and is itself a branch nerve and not a stem for other nerves to branch off of... it just takes fifteen feet of wiring to do what three inches would do. What makes this worse is that there are other nerves already traveling down the neck for other purposes that it could have branched off of way earlier, and that its twin, the superior laryngeal nerve, actually does just take the inches long trip direct from brain to larynx, so it's not as if the designer didn't know that was possible. It just decided that on the left side, but not the right, that nerve needed to go down under the heart for no good reason.

Or maybe, in the giraffe's ancient, fishlike ancestor, that nerve pathway was totally direct, but as the neck evolved as its own structure, the nerve had to loop under the gradually lowering heart because it was caught on the wrong side?

This is already getting long, so I'll try to tackle the evolution thing quickly. I know the supposed mechanisms for evolution. I (and many PhD scientists) agree that these mechanisms are insufficient to produce the new information.

No PhD biologists, though. Nobody with a degree in the relevant field. Besides which, if you really want to play the scientist game, then I can do that, because acceptance of evolution among the scientific community hovers at around 97%, according to the Pew Research Center. So, your three percent of scientists versus my 97 percent: where you wanna put your money?

Moreover, "evolution can't explain X," is an argument from ignorance, and certainly not a reason to go on to accept the design hypothesis. No, you'd need positive evidence of that position, not just a willingness to poke holes in your opposition, as though mainstream science doesn't already acknowledge that it doesn't know everything yet.

It seems to reason that slight modifications could build up over time and lead to substantial changes, but the reality is that these random changes impair the function of proteins. There are many evidences that directly contradict evolution, but if I give one to you, you will likely say I'm arguing from ignorance and we will figure out later how it works.

I'll give you a hint: if I can literally observe a phenomena happen in a laboratory whenever I want to, then you'd better not just be asking me to believe that that phenomena doesn't exist just on the basis that it can't explain specific examples of things yet. If I can see it happening, then "it's not happening because you haven't explained this yet," is not a compelling argument. It's like arguing that gravity doesn't exist because we haven't figured out black holes yet. Gravity clearly does exist, and so does evolution. We haven't figured everything out yet, but science is probabilistic, not certainty based: we don't need absolutely every fact to establish that something does or does not happen.

Just a quick example, Rhizobacteria colonize the roots of legumes. the legumes have specific enzymes that escort the bacteria to their nodule. The legumes have another enzyme (I think it's leghemoglobin) that carry trace amounts of oxygen to the bacteria so that they can undergo metabolism and survive. The bacteria then take atmospheric nitrogen (N2, which if you know about chemistry its two triple bonded atoms, so it isn't easy to break) and convert it into usable nitrogen for the plant so that it can make nucleic acids and whatnot. Without this complex interaction between the two being spot on precise, then the nitrogen would not get fixed and the plants would die. How would the plants survive enough generations to slowly evolve this interaction when its absence leads to their inability to evolve?

Your mistake is in assuming that there would only be one evolutionary process going on at a time, when we know that's not the case. Off the top of my head, the legumes may have had the ability to produce its own nitrogen in the past, but upon the development of its symbiotic relationship with the bacteria that ability evolved out because it was no longer necessary and was a waste of energy due to its new symbiosis. The reverse could also be true, and frankly it's a much more parsimonious explanation because we can confirm that evolution does happen, and cannot do the same with design. The ID argument requires at least one more huge assumption not in evidence than the evolution one does, and the latter has the benefit of only relying on demonstrable phenomena to make its case.

 Information is not a term that I just made up, I think anyone who studies genetics recognizes that there is information in the DNA just as much as there is information in this sentence.

Sure, my contention though, is that we differ on how important information is to the overall process. I understand that information is a retroactive phenomena, imposed after the fact by pattern-seeking minds reviewing natural phenomena. You, on the other hand, seem to think of information as some inherent, vital, and objectively real quantity that organisms need to operate, rather than a label placed on conceptual things by minds.

As for the need for the increase in complexity, I don't know if there is a mainstream definition that says it, but surely you aren't denying that it needs to happen.

I absolutely am denying that, because evolution isn't some constant advancement in complexity: organisms evolve to lose structures they no longer need, or evolve new structures without an overall increase in complexity all the time. Whales used to have hands, for example, and you can still see the fingers in the bones of their flippers, but they lost them over time as they evolved to suit an aquatic environment. By all accounts, they lost complexity through evolution.

As for my definition of biological information, yeah it wasn't the best, but enzymes do attempt to accomplish a goal. Obviously they aren't doing it consciously or anything, but I think you can agree with the terminology if I say the goal of DNA polymerase is to replicate the genome. Maybe the word 'purpose' is better.

Purpose does work better, because now you aren't biasing the conversation toward design with your word choices. Purpose, incidentally, does not require a designer to exist, because purposes can be assigned to objects after they come into existence.