Fabulous post, Yanniru!

Yanniru:
"Yet the entirety of his argument for intelligent works, in my opinion, for self-organizing design."

(snip apologetically)
Yanniru: " I agree that design is required and that mutation/selection alone is insufficient. But it seems to me that Kauffman's theory of self-organization is the most likely source of such new designs. Most important it includes the mechanism by which design happens. "

********
Mike
Possibly the "long jump mutation" to discrete new forms could occur in incremental steps to a very changed form of that species over a small number of generations.

While the mutation rate is still high, due perhaps to unusual levels of disruptive chemical or energy inputs, each generation of survivors is a small minority among a large variety of mutations and each will also have a large number of non-surviving descendents but a few surviving ones.
To illustrate this, draw a large series of family tree branches where a small number of procreating survivors are among the larger number of varied mutated descendents.

Intelligent design is needed in our time, as the alternative is stupid design.
Human design is the driving force of ecosystem evolution in our time, and when ecosystem's not happy, ain't nobody happy.
We are bringing about the second largest extinction event of all time on Earth in the 21st Century.
This has been foreseen by evolutionary biologists for at least a couple of decades and is clearly under way.




Hi Yanniru. I imagined you arrived in a coffee shop in Ellensburg, Wash., but it was by intuition only. I was too dazed and hurried that day to approach the mirage I half consciously imagined was you. In fact, it was only after I had left that it dawned on me that some day our paths might cross ( or should I say triangulate or meet on the merry-go- round of life ) as I have met Paul.
Mike