Engineering

That's the result of natural selection: Creatures that are less well adapted for survival get eaten while those that are better adapted get to reproduce.

That's your opinion, not a fact, good engineering isn't happenstance, and good design isn't either. We can in life point to good engineering and know what it takes, we can point to good design and know what that takes, and we can look at the biological world and know it above what we can do, and you think that is a mindless process was been producing such results, why?

"That's your opinion" - no, it's a demonstrable matter of fact and is observable today throughout the natural world.

Design in nature is only obvious if you start with the presumption of design.

And natural selection guiding mindlessly evolutionary processes is demonstrable without presumptions, how? They are competing hypotheses, which is the most reasonable, when you look at all of the complexity and the specified functionality in life, mindlessness is the reasonable cause in your opinion?

But the wildebeest that runs that little bit slower or maneuvers less skillfully than another is probably going to end up as lunch for the lions, no? And the one that can out-maneuvre the lions and at greater speed is probably going to survive long enough to produce offspring.

I had in mind 'demonstrable' natural selection in that sense.

What does that have to do with chemical reactions?

Weren't we discussing natural selection? Well I was anyway.

I was speaking about something a little more binary, mindlessness or mind. Getting into natural selection doesn't address chemical reactions taking this turn or that biologically, it assumes something in behavior will drive chemical changes within DNA.

"it assumes something in behavior will drive chemical changes within DNA"

No, cart before the horse! We can be sure that random variations in living organisms occur because we can see it all around us. Consider all the variations we see in our own species.

In nature some variations (caused by random mutations in DNA) can be viewed as beneficial in that they give creatures more chance of survival and others disadvantageous. The faster, more agile wildebeest really is likely to survive longer than the slower one.

In that sense natural selection filters new variations according to enhanced fitness to survive.

Again, no one disputes the more qualified to survive will survive, but that is a filter due to who is the best suited in their environment among the competition. That does not cause a shift in a body's genetic code altering into something else, that is on the molecular level, it knows nothing of the world the body is living in. The mechanisms of genetic code are informational driven, a body's form, if it were to change, will only occur if the instructions in it are rewritten, the new code then gets stored in such a way it gets passed down in the population enough to cause a change over time to masses. A filter is an after-the-fact change event, accepting the acceptable and rejecting the unacceptable, filters weed out code anomalies, they don't write them.

Did you not understand my 'cart before the horse' remark?

This is my layman's over-simplified understanding of evolution by natural selection:-

Imgine a species of creature in which all members are genetically identical. Then a mutation occurs in the DNA of one individual at birth. Let's say that mutation causes slightly more muscle to be produced enabling this individual to run faster and escape predators.

This one individual manages to reproduce and pass its mutation ('variation') on to its offspring which in turn have a slight advantage when it comes to escaping predators. Over 1000 generations would we expect the variation to increase throughout the population?

Yes, of course, all other factors being equal. In that way a beneficial mutation may not only survive from generation to generation but increase within the species, possibly until it becomes the main or sole variation.

But this isn't about a creature's behaviour somehow becoming 'encoded' into its DNA, it's about random changes in the DNA passed down from parent to offspring, that are acted upon by natural selection (the imperative to survive long enough to produce viable offspring).

I remember a fascinating documentary on this subject many years ago. The researchers were using Fruit-Flies as their subject and these flies often show the most bizarre mutations.

One fly had a leg growing out of its eye! This wasn't anything the research team had engineered, simply a naturally occuring variation within the species. I think that fly was able to fly around and feed.

Of course some mutations may cause an individual to die quite soon after birth.

I understood it perfectly, you want a faster horse that will give it to you, but it will not turn the horse into a rose bush over time.

More time than not, the result of mutations from the norm results in death, which is another stick against building something new on the fly without killing off the species first.

? I have no idea what that's supposed to mean - a horse that will give what exactly, what is 'it'?

And who's ever claimed that any plant came from any animal?

Those remarks are bizarre.

Are you aware of just how 'wasteful' nature is? Have you never watched natural history documentaries on the life-cycle of turtles for example?

About 98% of all hatchlings are devoured by birds, other animals and predatory fish. Only a tiny fraction make it to breeding age. Against that background the deaths of a few due to fatal mutations is lost in the noise.

Creatures changing body plans are part of the Darwinian evolutionary theory isn't it, while breeding can give you faster horses it will not alter the body structure of a horse into something else, and since life has in it a variety of body types plants, animals, aquatic, and so on there had to be changes in body plans along the way for the variety of life we see to appear.

I'm aware we don't always know why things occur the way they do. I believe it was a Microsoft programmer working on mimicking life's information structure by attempting to write code to copy how life did it was blown out of the water in how life handled information, the layers upon layers of complex structures, and how they acted just baffled him, I wish I could recall where this came from, but he said there were folders inside of folders, inside of folders...tracking and making corrections. I think it is more likely we simply don't understand what is going on then there is waste and carelessness to the design in life.

"Creatures changing body plans are part of the Darwinian evolutionary theory.."

No, absolutely not, at least not from an animal into a plant or vice-versa. That isn't any part of evolutionary theory.