To whom were you praying?

I'm going to be a couple hundred miles southeast of you for the next two weeks -- maybe we can swim and meet in the middle.

Optimist

I was GI Joe then. No kung-fu grip, though. I was stationed at Ft Meade just outside Washington DC when Martin Luther King was assassinated.

In 1968 (a few years before email was invented), Hubert Humphrey was running for president. I got a letter in the real mail from him thanking me for some previous contributions (which I had not made), and including a return postage paid mail envelope for me to send him another contribution. I taped it to a brick and dropped it in a mailbox. He never did send me a thank you note.

http://www.postregister.com/articles/news-daily-email-todays-headlines/2016/07/12/t*********r-woman-arrested-voyeurism-target

Not

I generally ignore posts made by richard-sports because he generally seems to want to stir the s**t pot without really saying anything of substance. When I see him using a racial slur like "knuckle d**gger", it seems like he's trying to alienate a larger crowd than just conservatives.

You point out an excellent point and a very fine line. I need to ensure that I am not asking for an answer that equates to an identity (or perhaps, an anti-identity).

Nevertheless, I have studied this question as an amateur for years and continue to see a dead-end to macro evolution as proposed by many current thinkers. The commonly accepted description of the evolutionary process is that random mutation plus natural se******n plus time equals the development of new species. I would propose (as would others) that the description should be adaptive mutation plus natural se******n plus time equals that development.

There are many well-documented instances of adaptive mutation occurring. I will point to Schwendener's observations of lichens and other symbiotic mergers of DNA and McClintock's discovery of real-time healing of DNA by sequence t***sposition after being damaged by radiation as instances of adaptive mutation. There are many more, but I'm not going to start citing them unless someone is really interested.

Nevertheless, this adaptive mutation is a refining solution rather than a deteriorating one as is random mutation. The argument that this mutation is the result of intent is much more compelling than the argument that it is the result of happenstance.

I must have hit "send" before finishing my post, but you have gotten its intent. I would be most interested in seeing another natural instance of such an encoding system, and when I do I will likely change my outlook on the subject. Until then, my conclusion is that it must have been designed by an intelligent entity.

I'm not a religious person. Refute these statements if you can --

1. DNA is a code - a language and an information storage mechanism
2. There is no natural process known

I think that its you who is unclear on the concept and effects of random mutation.

Thanks for the input. Random mutation plus natural se******n would lead to a deteriorating solution, not a refining one. Nevertheless, I am eager to see another naturally occurring self replicating and self modifying code when it is discovered.

That is true -- it's also true that there is no known self replicating and self modifying code that was made without a designer. And there are prizes of hundreds of thousands of dollars available to someone who can discover one. Millions of dollars if it can be patented. Until such code is identified, the best answer is that DNA was designed.

Life and trees aren't naturally occurring self replicating and self modifying code. DNA is. DNA is a readable code that tells trees what to be. It does the same for the rest of life. It had a designer.

Point taken, and I'll reconsider the argument.

The point I was going to eventually make if the discussion went that way is that it seems overwhelmingly unlikely that DNA was created by random mutations and natural se******n. There is no other instance in the known universe of a naturally occurring self replicating and self modifying code. (And by code, I mean complete system - an information encoder, the code itself and an information decoder all using decipherable and meaningful symbols). There are significant prizes offered for the discovery of another such code. Until such prizes are claimed, I conclude that DNA was created just like any other code and was not the end result of happenstance.