CAID Exchanges

This is from a post at the CAID comment section involving an exchange in which my comments are identified. Incidentally, when I access the website my posts appear in extremely small letters. I was informed that this not Aleph's experience. It is only the CAID website where this occurs for me. Does anyone else have this experienece? From the site:

http://www.caidweb.org/blog/


Bradford: I wrote ‘biological purpose’ but then you read what you want a sentence to say.

Okay, fine - the universe is also not obligated to satisfy your sense of “biological purpose” either. It replicates, and that’s enough for natural selection to act on it.

Bradford: Biological functions are objectively measurable. It's not a matter of what my sense of it is. Natural selection is based on the belief that any biological system that confers a selective advantage will be retained by an organism. What selective advantage produces a cell from a peptide with 32 residues? Where do you get a functional genome from this?

Self-replicators that form bad copies are
likely to produce non-functional offspring.

Bradford: What constitutes a "bad copy" in an extra-cellular environment?

Self-replicators that form good copies are likely to produce functional copies.

Bradford: This is idiocy. What research paper indicates that "good copies" of a 32 residue peptide lead to functional cellular proteins? Where do nucleotides and phosphate groups come from? Give me a scientific response rather than silly assertions.

Really, these are not exceedingly difficult
questions, nor are they especially novel.

Bradford: The only answers you've provided involve waving a replicating magic wand in place of descriptions of real biochemical pathways.

Perhaps you'd be better off learning a bit about
evolution before we proceed

Bradford: A replicating peptide in a precellular environment is an abiogenesis scenario. I thought you knew the difference between evolution and abiogenesis. Do you need a basic biochemistry primer?