Where is your evidence? Genetic engineering analagous to human endeavors requires advanced technologies. What did the designer(s) do? Snap their fingers? Given the obvious progression of life on earth what other explanation can you offer other than descent with modification?

Essentially, you don't like some examples because the new binding site is not "new" (it is) and other because they include organisms with millions of years since divergence.

De gustibus non est disputandum.

Sickle Hb is a special case of protein-protein interaction.  The interaction that is exposed by by the substitution is weak as compared to the interactions one encounters in fully functional protein machines.  It is nearly one hundred times weaker than the typical binding locations and its dissociation constant is quite high (Ivanova, M., et al., 2000,  Nonideality and the nucleation of sickle hemoglobin, Biophysics Journal).  The only reason it has the effect it does is because the red blood cell unlike nearly all other cells has nearly 90% of all its protein content as one protein, namely hemoglobin.  This high concentration compensates for the weak association and allows the hemoglobin to congeal into an incoherent web of gelatin in contrast to the protein interactions one encounters in functional systems.

Clearly the difference between sickle hemoglobin and all the others is stark.  It is clear that this is a case of an accident as we all acknowledge mutations are.  The others have the strong appearance of intentional design and we have yet to observe how unintentional constrained chance process can build coherent systems when the overwhelming number of permutations are incoherent (systems of proteins involve permutation in the range of 10^50 to 10^40000).

True enough, but I'm not sure we are using the term in the same sense.


I used it because the examples seemed easier to illustrate than the gene and regulatory control examples and because the context seemed easier to describe as well.  When we deconstruct developmental control systems they look as much like electrical control circuits and logic as any of the control systems I've built for process control  so I am happy to entertain them as well.

Either way the conclusions is the same and that is that modification by evolutionary processes along with natural selection are not observed to build the kind of systems we find when we peer into the functioning cell.  Instead we find evolution damaging coherent funtion, generating incoherent byproducts and only preserving these changes when selection pressure is such that the damage also disrupts an even more damaging system

So what's the subtext to this discussion? That evolution is a myth? That humans were created 4,354 years ago last Tuesday?

except that they can, but that is neither here not there for the religionist on a campaign to burn science on the pyre.

You can demonstrate with empirical evidence that your statement is true?  You and I both know you cannot.  You have presupposition, a narrative, a few boxes of similar looking fossils, and some similar genes and DNA strands and that is it.  But even the fossils and DNA are not evidence of your claim since neither tells us anything of how they came to appear the way they do.  Sorry barney the scientific method demands more.  Observed evolutionary processes have not demonstrated that they are capable of generating the large quantities of new biological information required to transform a community of organisms into a new genera in the timeframes indicated by the presumed life-span of this planet.  Perhaps you can tell me how evolutionary processes generate new biological information.  Next you can tell me what rate it does so.  No you can't answer these questions either.


You seem to have a bad habit of presuming and ascribing beliefs to your opponent.  I have not made this claim and do not agree with it.


I do not disagree with the words quoted here either.  I am quite aware that microorganisms are evolving in response to drug selection pressures.