Dr. Hunter,
Hope you are doing well by God’s grace today.
That’s a claim I cannot accept. The mapping of 64 codons to 20 amino acids might be a telos to Richard Dawkins, but I don’t think it would be a telos to Aristotle or Aquinas. It certainly doesn’t seem like a telos worthy of the God I worship.
My general observation is that biology, like basically every other branch of science, has some unsolved mysteries that are being researched. Your examples have pointed out that in something as complex as life, much variance (“noise”) exists alongside or within the theory (“signal”). Your examples scarcely begin to address the existence of the signal, as far as I can tell.
To provide one example, Nakhleh (2013) describes the considerable progress made in the reconciliation of phylogenies, while acknowledging the challenges that remain. Your approach, as far as I can tell, is to cite the remaining challenges without acknowledging the progress that has been made. This is how I am interpreting benkirk’s response to your series of articles:
The mountain of evidence for common descent includes the fossils showing the development of fins in Cetacea, the patterns in the distribution of endogenous retroviruses and pseudogenes, etc. If you want to convince the 99% of the biologists who disagree with you, I suspect you’ll have to address the strong evidence at the heart of the theory of evolution, rather than nibble around the edges and proclaim its defeat.
My $.02