[fragsworth]

> To summarize, the design of biological systems is random. It was a hard pill for me to swallow.

There are so many things about our universe that are very non-random, such as the physical laws, and more specifically the spherical shapes of planets/stars, the flatness of their surfaces, the flow of energy from stars to planets, etc.

An analogy could be that life forms randomly evolving with these constraints are like water particles randomly floating through a river. There are plenty of variations in where the particles can go, but they flow in a general direction.

[jostmey]

I guess I was trying to draw a distinction between biological systems and man made machines. I find the difference striking. I can look at a car engine, and if I stare at it long enough, I can make sense of it. The engine makes sense to me not just because it was designed by another human but also because its design is non-random. When I stare at the protein KcsA, which is the biological system that I study, I cannot make sense of its design. My conclusion is that its design is an outcome of chance. The protein works and has a design but it is not one that I can figure out.

Man made machines have a rational design. Biological systems have an "irrational" design. The most striking characteristic of a randomly designed system is that you cannot restart it. Once you shut it off it dies permanently.

[apl]

  >  The most striking characteristic of a randomly designed
  > system is that you cannot restart it. Once you shut it off
  > it dies permanently.

I don't see how that is a consequence of the underlying design principle. There are many organisms that survive de-facto death through freezing etc. You could also engineer machines to not be restartable, and under certain circumstances that may be a desirable feature. There's no connection between what you call rational or irrational design and restarting.

Moreover, there are natural mechanisms with "sensible" design. To me, the mammalian retina is very carefully calibrated, perfectly understandable machinery implementing various filters and feature extraction networks. Examples abound.

[nazka]

Yes saying it is that random is like to expect nature to build a complex organism like us by only being like a monkey typing randomly on the keyboard of chemistry, physics etc... and be able to create that.

Even if it was the case then the earth would be full of defective cells to animals across the whole tree of life with only a few working well. It's not what we find when we mine the earth or what we have today.

But even still with a "keyboard" that complex.. You will need more than billions of years to accomplish something that complex randomly.