rationalskepticism.org

Err...I didn't. I said "The above sequence was never the goal and equally the non-existent sequences were never the goal."

It is you that keeps bring up the idea that there is a goal. Well obviously the person who sets up the fitness function is the designer which is why you want there to be a goal.

And there is such a thing as fitness function of nature. And to whatever it is set up, that is the goal.

You are painting the target as it is you that is picking the flagellum. These flagellum exist but there isn't any intent.

No I'm not. The nature has set up the target by it's properties. Nature selects certain sequences over others. That is nature's fitness function, and that is the goal.

You're going to have to show where this has been said that way by scientists. When you start to use "search" then though the terminology may be comforting to others, problems arise e.g. in the topic of protein folding there are a vast numbers of possible structures but the protein manages to fold in a short time. Humans use vast search routines to try and predict the structure - with varying degrees of success.

The scientists use evolution to solve problems and they call it the evolutionary search.

http://www.waset.org/journals/waset/v39/v39-4.pdf

Again and again we must highlight that is not the goal of Natural selection as there is not goal. You only relate to this as a goal for whatever reason you personally have.

Yes, this is the goal. When people create evolutionary algorithms they set up the fitness function themselves. In other words they decide what will get selected and what will not. Thus they set up a goal. And in nature it is the rpoperties of nature that decide which organism is fit and which is not, and then natural seelction selects.

Only because they were told to do a search. Are you saying that the sea (i.e. the environment) was told to "perform the search" when something enters the sea ? This is rather stretching the imagination somewhat.

No, it wasn't told, but by teh properties of teh sea it can perform a search. Take 100 animals, drop them all in the sea and hold them under water for 2 hours. Some will survive, some will not. The properties of the sea decided which will live and which will not. Fish-like animals will survive, mammal-like will not. If the environment was reversed, in the case where you held animals on the ground for 2 hours, then fish-like animals would die without oxygen, and mammal-like animals would survive. Properite of the nature decided what will survive and what will not.

There is no goal with evolution. You are equivocating the word goal. A goal without a purpose is an outcome. The nature selects for fit animals in a particular environment. This is an outcome of evolution (natural selection). There is no goal in mind so there is no search.

What is the difference between the outcome and the goal?

As you have clearly stated what selects for an object is the physical environment it is in. Mount Rushmore is a huge chunk of granite rock face so it is not going to be moving around so we examine how incongruous it is to the environment and our understanding of weathering of rock faces.

So is the flagellum. The majority of Earth surface is earth, rock and water. A flagellum is a totally incongrous to this environment.

Pretty quickly we find that Mount Rushmore is incongruous with a scree slopes below the face containing large fragments and tooling marks that would suggest an assisted and un-natural weathering.

What's teh difference between the part of Mount Rushmore where the faces are, and where they are not?

These are different situations as no SETI person says that the aliens visited Earth and stuck tails on bacteria.

But they say that they have a method that tells them that aliens exits. And not only that that they can communicate with radio communication.

SETI exists because it is the only practical way of discovering if intelligent Aliens exist (though atmospheric changes on exoplanets may tell us if aliens have converted atmopheres that won't imply intelligence). Non-natural Radio transmission by default means an intelligent source. So until we get superluminal speed spacecraft we're stuck here on Earth. How else would you propose to discover intelligent life ?

Well ID proposes to do teh same thing. Non-natural patterns like the flagellum also signal design.

How incongruous something is to its environment that could have formed it suggests agency is involved. So finding a flagellum on a mountain, where none is expected to exist, would suggest agency is involved (in this case it was you that put it there).

So, the flagellum is designed, becasue the majority of Earth's surface is earth, rocks and water?

After a foray into your mathematics I'm going to stay with how something is incongruous to the physical it is located in.

How do you decide if something is incongrous?

The many types of bacteria flagellum are not obviously incongruous.

How did you decide that?

Religious people are desperate to get religion into the classroom in the US by whatever means. The courts are used to uncover the devious tactics used to undermine science. Intelligent design is just one such tactic. It has been very clearly stated that it is religious in nature. That you don't accept what the courts say is neither here nor there on this matter. Both in the US and the UK, "design" is not science.

Why should I care what lawyers and judges think about scientific questions?

If a designer uses evolutionary tactics i.e. the toolchain is genetic algorithms then we are unable to make any claims about the origin of the "independently given pattern". If the designer does not use evolutionary tactics i.e. the toolchain is not selected using genetic algorithms then we are able to make any claims about the origin of the "independently given pattern"

We can do it in both cases, we simply have to know if the pattern we are looking at is imporbable enough to come about by chance or not.

You are making claims about the origin of the "independently given pattern" without identifying the toolchain. That is presumptuous.

It's irrelevant. It's eitehr design, chance, or natural law.

Current scientific consensus on the bacteria flagellum shows a natural and evolutionary pathway as the "toolchain" to construct the flagellum.

This is not the case, obviously, but I will assume it's true. Now what? Does that mean that the flagellum was not designed? No, it doesn't.

I would have thought that as you already are certain that there is a designer then you would be interested. This is a rather odd approach you take. We look at the pyramids and we presume a designer - I'd be interested in who they were. But that is me.

Different strokes for different folks.