[betty boop]

My comparison is valid because a submarine must WORK in order to make it into the museum of Naval Warfare History. Can't make history if you don't work

My point is the submarine is designed to work. That is, it's not the end-product of a virtually endless chain of prior random events that somehow ended up by (serendipitously!) getting it "just right" to do what submarines do.

Surely you can discriminate the difference between "design" and a "crap shoot" that somehow gets things right by accident.

[allmendream]

Not critical to the analogy. The analogy was that you don't make history unless you work and had an impact. You don't make the fossil record unless you were successful enough as a species prolific and wide spread enough to get some members of your species fossilized.

Natural selection is not random either. It is a trial and error process that keeps designs that work and discards designs that do not work.

Check out “directed evolution” as an example of how novel enzymes are made for industrial purposes by random variation and selecting for the necessary traits.

It is a MUCH more powerful system for designing enzymes, right now, then attempting to design an enzyme with the necessary traits on paper and then making it in the lab.