What is the Significance of Sequence Similarity?

This kind of post is long overdue in that it addresses some points that Darwinists take for granted. Logan Gage posted 'What Exactly Does Genetic Similarity Demonstrate?' at Evolution News & Views. From the article:

"My hope is that one day thinking about Darwinian Theory will become clearer in the public square. Recall that Darwin made two claims: (1) all living beings descend from one or a few original ancestors, and (2) the mechanism driving the changes among species is the blind, unguided mechanism of natural selection."

The second claim unites all IDists although the first one is not uniquely supported by the descent paradigm. The second claim rests heavily on unwarrented extrapolations of adaptive changes observed largely in unicellular organisms.

"As Francis Collins, head of the project which mapped the human genome, has written of DNA sequence similarities, “This evidence alone does not, of course, prove a common ancestor” because an intelligent cause can reuse successful design principles. We know this because we are intelligent agents ourselves, and we do this all the time. We take instructions we have written for one thing and use them for another. The similarity is not the result of a blind mechanism but rather the result of our intelligent activity."

The author makes a good point. The reuse of successful design strategies is practiced by known intelligent designers. It is logical and therefore something one would expect in an intelligently traced causal trail. The trail, in this case, began with the origin of life which, evolutionists frequently go to pains to point out, is distinct from the evolutionary process itself. A genetic code itself and the coming into existence of encoding sequences strongly suggests intelligent causality. Particularly since the chemical bonds, identified in nucleic acids, would not favor either random development of a code or the alignment of sequences linked to the synthesis of basic universal enzymes thought to exist in initial cells. Symbolic codes however, are an indicator of intelligence. There is a reasonable and, I would argue, compelling link between the two.