Another Test for Intelligent Design Proponents

Maybe God is a little more appreciative of the collossal effort and sacrifice generally required for scientific achievement than you are?

The majority of science, something like 80%, goes on at academic institutions rather than private industry. The private industry doesn't actually do all that much research. The federal government does a little on its own but largely, just relies on the institutions to do it.A researcher working in academia would be lucky, I think, to pull down 40k a year, depending on their field and the institution in question. That would be after a decade of grueling poverty as an undergrad, grad, and post-doc, and probably another decade or two of near-poverty working towards tenure as an assistant or associate professor, working over 60 hours a week, every week.You really have no idea what it's like to work in the sciences, do you? The only thing worse is being married to someone working in the sciences.

Sure. But scienists as a whole aren't generally known for being a leisure class.

Um, scientists often do starve, to some degree, and they really get nothing in return except pride in their own accomplishments. And nobody who's really poor works for "nothing in return"; they don't have the luxury of volunteering. If it doesn't pay, they can't afford to do it.So it's not at all clear what you're talking about. Or rather, it's not clear what you're expecting us to understand from your staments aside from a furious backpedal from statements that were proven to you to be false.

But that's nonsense. As much as ID advocates try to duck the question, when they posit a designer, they're talking about a fairly narrow field of qualified applicants:1) Must be an eternal being (or, as in the case of your alien from Mars, you're forced into the position of wondering who designed them, and then who designed that designer, ad infinitum - or else admit that designers aren't required, in which case, ID refutes itself)2) Must have powers that surpass natural law (since the argument of ID is that natural laws cannot account for the formation of these complex living things)If we're not talking about God, then the word "god" is meaningless. For some reason ID proponents think they can promulgate a story that would directly implicate a god in the creation of life, and then pretend like they weren't the ones that brought religion into it. It's ridiculous hair-splitting. The only designer consistent with ID is an eternal, omnipotent one, and if we're not talking about a god at that point, who are we talking about?

Maybe because puzzle pieces don't ever mutate, and are never selected? What on earth would make you think that a jigsaw puzzle constitutes an appropriate analogy for reproducing organisms? Useful for what? What were your friends expecting to do? Leash one and have it carry his books? What makes you think they don't?

Right. When you have an equal mix of both, that's called a "racemic" mixture.But natural, inorganic processes exist that can seperate the one from the other. So amino handedness isn't really an obstacle to abiogenesis. Well, only in a living thing that is developing L-handed proteins. Now, granted, that's every living thing on Earth, but there's no reason you couldn't have an organisms based on mirror-image chemistry, using d-handed aminos to make d-handed proteins. It's rather arbitrary, in fact. The fact that all living things share this mostly arbitrary handedness is a powerful evidence for common ancestry. Well, that's not true. Functional protiens can be assembled from a "palette" limited to as little as 8 different amino acids. What makes you think we're not chemists? What makes you think I don't have a whole shelf of graduate-level biochem texts sitting on my bookshelf?