Since Warren might not get back to you for a couple of months (busy as he is poring over the thrilling oeuvre of Mike Gene), I can only guess what form his reply will take. However, both Mark24 and myself have provided Warren with the fascinating hypothesis by Ian Musgrave at the University of Adelaide concerning the evolution of the BacFlag. It will astonish you to hear he wasn't convinced.
I've sworn off debating with Warren, since he's long since turned into the Intelligent Design Creationism Broken Record. He seems to think it strange that we can't come up with a reason to think that teleology had anything to do with the origin of the BacFlag. What he's been told is that we've never seen teleology contribute to the natural origin of organisms or structures in any other instance.
What Warren calls "Naturalism of the Gaps" is actually more valid than "God of the Gaps" because material mechanisms have in fact been discovered for such former mysteries as heredity, disease, fermentation, and adaptation of organisms to their environments. I still have not heard of a single instance of a non-naturalistic explanation contributing to scientific inquiry.
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I would not let the chickens cross the antidote road because I was already hospitlized for trying to say this!-Brad McFall
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