Intelligent Design

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It isn't a screwed up design. There are hundreds of thousands of examples of what could be interpreted as a miracle of evolution or a brilliant design. The photolyase enzyme, repressor proteins, the cyclin dependent kinase/cyclin complex, the p53 protein and its ability to halt the cell cycle in the presence of DNA damage, structure of neurons with their ion gates that allow electrical impulses to be transferred incredible rapidly, the promoter regions before protein coding regions in DNA that allow for variation, the telomeres and their ability to be silenced in body cells while being expressed in germ line cells. The olfactory bulb where a chemical stimuli is transformed into an electrical impulse. The ability of the cell to organize its chromosomes in the nucleus. The ability of the cell's machinery to attach to the centromere of each chromosome and separate it during anaphase. The mechanisms to minimize wasted resources.

Those are just a few of the many examples of excellent design. You can go on and complain about the structure of your knee or the spinal nerves or whatever you think is poorly designed, but the fact is that sometimes structures can only be improved to a certain point before they begin to impede the function of other structures. It is optimally designed, despite some degradation of our genome over the course of time that we have been here. If you use the poorly designed argument, then you have to ignore almost everything about biology and cling to a few controversial examples.

Can you prove they were all designed? As a scientist, you should know as much as anyone what sort of evidence is required for proof.

Hint: scientific evidence is NOT anecdotal, as is everything which you have presented so far.

Regarding the fact that the hardware behind life functions actually perform, that is proof only that it's good enough to do what it does. Being that it had 4.5 billion years to do that much, it really isn't so remarkable.

No I can't prove they were designed, but they share features with things that we know only arise from intelligent designer, such as interacting parts that work together to achieve a goal, and a specific sequence that holds information. Therefore I think the default conclusion should be that it was designed. If a coherent alternative to design works, then I may change my mind, but the theory of evolution hasn't done a good job of explaining the origin of the complex enzymes that interact with each other to produce a desired effect. Saying it had 4.5 billion years to get that way is assuming that evolution actually happens. We don't know that the information in DNA gets better over time. You are presupposing that.

 Can you prove that they evolved? No, there is no observable evidence that can be presented to prove either side. We have to compare the thing that we are trying to explain (a chemical code that produces a desired effect) based on our experience of such a phenomenon.