When a human designs something, (s)he knows what the overall purpose of the design is, and uses that knowledge to make the design more efficient, less expensive, less complex, more dependable, etc. For example, multi-room buildings have adjacent rooms separated by integral shared walls, rather than separated by a pair of wall modules back to back between the adjacent rooms. Another example: a faucet designed to mix hot and cold water brings both water supplies to a mixing point, and has valves for modulating the ratio of the flow of hot and cold water in order to achieve different temperatures. The design of a modern single-lever faucet integrates both the mixing function and the ratio modulating function. A third example is integrated electronic circuits, which are laid out by the designer to fit in a socket with multiple pin connections for the various functions built into the design.
If life structures and processes were designed by a designer, i.e. an entity who knew how the parts would fit together and function together, one would expect to find evidence of integrated design throughout life forms. However, the structures and processes of life are largely modular. That is, the bits and pieces of living things are largely distinct from each other. Thus it is possible to smash up a living thing and get out of it pieces which work substantially as they did in the assembled life form. That property is what makes possible the research fields of biochemistry and molecular biology. Consider the proteins which are enzymes, for example. Each enzyme catalyzes a specific reaction or closely related set of reactions at a specific catalytic site on the enzyme. The catalytic site is often only a small part of the protein. In an integrated design, it could be more efficient to make multple uses of individual proteins, rather than having a different protein platform for each type of catalytic site. One would expect to find multiple catalytic sites on some proteins, each site capable of catalyzing a different reaction.
Modularity is the rule, not the exception in the design of life forms. Each piece has an existence largely independent of the other pieces. I am proposing that the absence of integrated design characteristics in life forms is scientific evidence against a designer who knew the ultimate purpose of the parts in life forms.
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