You really don’t Tim or you are misrepresenting the argument intentionally.
Yet another non-response.
If people don’t understand your argument, THEN CLARIFY IT.
What part do you say we don’t understand? Go ahead and clarify for us.
I have some vague hope to learn something useful out of this conversation. The back-n-forth jabs without much substance tend to make the thread unreadable (or at least very hard to follow).
I think @colewd made a fairly clear statement here:
And I think @Timothy_Horton made some excellent points here:
and here,
It seems like there is a whole lot of agreement that mutations can have beneficial, neutral, or negative effects (with beneficial being the least likely?), but the argument is over the long-term “big picture” of what happens as mutations accumulate, is that right?
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The positive argument is the evidence that a mind is behind what we are observing. Minds can purposefully arrange parts create complex sequences and create complex sequences that purposefully arrange parts. My non response is because I am surprised that you don’t know this already.
What evidence is that? What evidence do we have that the changes in DNA sequences were caused by a mind?
That’s not an argument Bill. That’s an assertion. It’s also a logical fallacy because we know for a fact complex sequences including IC structures can arise through unguided processes involving feedback. That means just finding complexity or IC by itself does not indicate an intelligent cause.
You continually ask this question and the trouble is you don’t like the implications of the answer so you evade it. We know a mind can create a complex sequence. This is what we observe in biology through nucleotide sequences and amino acid sequences. There is no other known cause of a novel complex sequence
This is a false statement that you have never supported.
We know that reproduction and random mutation can create complex sequences. We have a natural process that does what you are describing, so by your own criteria this rules out a mind.
Bill you know damn well that is false. You’ve seen the evidence presented to you dozens of times including again this morning. All you do is deny and run from the evidence.
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Exactly. The genome contains a sequence of chemicals that code for a sequence of amino acids. Change to functional sequences break them down over time. Even if you get a serendipitous selective advantage the long term trend does not change.
Except when the changes make them work better than the original would in a changed environment. It doesn’t matter that the old sequences are “broke down” since the new sequences work just as good or better.
Bill keeps dancing around the natural selection part which ensures we always have a functioning genome. It’s like if he admits the effect of selection the Debbil will strike him with a fiery bolt. 
That might be what a gene is, but it certainly is not what a genome is.
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Thanks. I agree.
So it seems like Behe/ID is taking sort of a longitudinal view. If we take any particular “function” and track it over time, then overall the tendency is for mutations to negatively affect that function (since negative mutations are more likely than positive ones). Is that correct @colewd?
It seems like @Timothy_Horton, et al. here are saying is that the longitudinal view of a single “function” doesn’t really matter because “one man’s junk is another man’s treasure”. Something that may “break” one function may be a benefit in another context/environment. By this way, we might categorize those mutations as beneficial in the long run. Is that a decent summary, @Timothy_Horton?
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Thats right. The mutations are breaking down the complex sequence. Since functional sequences live in almost infinite mathematical space the odds of them breaking down are much greater than improvement.
This is what Behe is observing empirically and is also what we would expect from the structure of genes and proteins.
Once again Bill ignores the effects of selection which tends to causes the “broken down” ones to be eliminated and the “improved” ones to spread through the population and become the new norm.
Bill why is natural selection such a difficult concept for you to grasp?
So if we compared ubiquitin genes among eukaryotes we would find that they are all degraded and non-functional in modern eukaryotes, with only fragments of ubiquitin pseudogenes left over?
It’s not hard to grasp it is just a very poor explanation for how complex sequences can be built or maintained.