Re:When they can explain... (Score 1)

And so you know, no, I will not argue "but every missing link discovered creates two more." I would, however, like an answer to the question you alluded to: If a part has no useful purpose in the current generation, why is it passed on?

It's a false argument. It presumes the ID crowd's mechanism of evolution, which says a complex system can only evolve by the slow accumulation of all it's parts, none of which had any useful function until the last part evolved into existence. But this simply ignores the possibility that might be other pathways to an irreducibly complex system. For example, what if some of the parts had a different function prior to becoming part of the irreducibly complex set? What if the set wasn't irreducibly complex in the past, but lost some proteins until the set that remained was irreducibly complex?

Or how about this conundrum. What if there was an "irreducibly complex" set of proteins performing a vital function, then some unrelated protein randomly evolved in a way that caused it to be better than one of the existing proteins. This made one of the proteins redundant, which then disappeared ('evolved away') leaving no trace. The remaining set is again "irreducibly complex". By observing the second set, can we now conclude that it was "intelligently designed"?

Gee, this is fun.