Is it intelligent to design evolvable species?

the most intelligent thing might be to design animals that can evolve themselves. ie. voluntarily change their DNA sequences according to the environmental conditions under which they find themselves. If you have cancer, you just change the DNA sequence of the cells in your tumour, and cure yourself. If the forest that you live in is flooded, you just change the DNA sequence of your eggs or sperm to ensure that your offspring have gills.It seems a bit risky to leave everything up to this random mutation business. In fact it seems spectacularly negligent on the part of the creator.mick

Hi Andya, I assume that "evolvability" is the ability of a population to adapt to its environment. It is certainly possible to interpret evolvability as intelligent design. The spread of beneficial mutations throughout a population, for example, seems a very intelligent way of going about helping the population to survive. In fact it seems so wondrous that I can understand how somebody might think it must have been intelligently designed, so that it works.However there are plenty of other aspects of population genetics besides the spread of beneficial mutations. Many of these aspects do not seem as well designed as evolvability.One is the "founder effect". If a population is established from a very small number of colonists, and some of those colonists have deleterious mutations, it is quite likely that some deleterious mutations will be fixed in the population due to genetic drift. A good example is the high frequency of Huntingdon's disease in the caucasian population of South Africa. Because the caucasian population started out as a very small population, the bad allele was fixed in a relatively large number of human lineages. This situation looks much less intelligently designed than the evolvability that you are talking about.Phenomena such as the founder effect should make us think twice about suggesting that evolution itself is intelligently designed, or even well-designed.Cheers!Mick[edited by Mick to give appropriate topic title]This message has been edited by mick, 05-16-2005 01:21 PM