Hemos lives in the US, and he recommends it. The flight from the US is not bad at all if you come for a week of conference and a week of holiday. See the great barrier reef!
Linux vs Mac OS X depends on how you measure it. Counting both servers and clients, I suspect Linux is ahead.
In terms of the relationship between laptops and big machines: I think relatively few Mac users really care about the fact that it's running Unix, and use it with big Unix machines. Obviously a lot of those on Slashdot will, but out of all users I think it's pretty low.
So Solaris is going to be a big competitor because it's nearly as good as Linux? How is that?
If they had got here say five years ago, when Solaris was still dominant in large IT, then I'd believe you. Many developers/admins were forced to Linux laptops and desktops because it's close enough to commercial unix, and they couldn't justify $8k for a decent workstation or the hassle of Solaris i386. But that battle has already been lost; Linux is now the standard, not Solaris.
I take it the 'tube' in your name refers to tube-based audio? I hope your analog audio advice is better-informed than your ideas about digital audio.
The difference signal you seek will be all zeros -- silence. There is exactly no difference, as others have explained. In practice, you will hear whatever noise your system produces in the analog stage when trying to reproduce silence. On an all-digital setup, it should be perfectly silent.
I like the way the favicon.ico for the Attorney-General's department looks like an orange three-eyed buck-toothed smiley. That gives the right note of absurdist humor.
The act covers any "representation, or description, for a sexual purpose, of a sexual organ or the anal region of a person under 18 years of age". So the troll (link?) that repeatedly posts the description of fucking his grandfather as a teenager is causing slashdot to distribute child pornography. tut tut.
Think for a moment: the behaviour of any particular molecule is not predictable, and yet we can predict the outcome of chemical experiments and draw solid conclusions about what is happening at the molecular level. Similarly with electrons or photons or what have you.
We cannot predict which individual bacteria will mutate, or how, or which ones will reproduce, but over hundreds of generations of millions of cells the result is deterministic. Perhaps 99.999999% of the mutations are bad, but the one bacteria that gets lucky will reproduce again and again until its children fill the whole slide. And so on and on, incredibly wasteful in one sense but nevertheless making progress. Obviously if you blast it hard enough you'll just kill them all, but that's boring and unrepresentative (at least until WW III.) The very fact that bad mutations do not get reproduced acts as the feedback mechanism.
We can tell that the result is due to a mutation for several reasons. Firstly, we can directly sequence the DNA and observe new patterns do exist in the succesful bacteria -- new information *was* created. Secondly, we can observe that the change persists even generations later, when the selective pressure is removed. Something is being passed through the generations that carries the information. (This was known to occur well before we knew that DNA was the (main) carrier.) In human terms: black people's children remain black even when they move to a cold climate; Irish-Australians remain prone to sunburn.
If it were a pre-programmed adaption turned on in response to the climate, it would not propagate through generations. Children of suntanned people are not born suntanned, and will never get suntanned unless they go out in the sun themselves. (They might have inherited a tendency to tan, or perhaps even a preference for sunny climes or outdoor work. Distinguishing different effects can be hard.)
Given enough time, skin cancer might well kill off all the Australians who are genetically prone to it, leaving only dark-skinned residents well adapted to the climate. This might take many generations, certainly more than the few dozens we can directly trace for humans. And of course given mixing through migration, and some ability to treat cancer, the effect might be hard to detect even then.
But you may say: well, this is just selection, not mutation. And indeed it probably is: mutation rates are rather lower in humans than bacteria, partly because humans have far fewer offspring and so can't afford to take big chances. (But why is the rate different? Because by evolving or relaxing checking techniques, species can tune their frequency of mutation and make themselves more safe or more adaptable.)
But it is selection of variations that originate in mutations: the first redhead was probably a freak, but it's harmless enough that they lived and reproduced, until now the gene is widespread in western populations, and common in some areas. Mutations in humans have been directly observed -- genes present in parents and children but not grandparents.
Some people are apparently naturally resistant to HIV; this probably began as a mutation, but (at least in the absence of medicine) that mutation would be incredibly beneficial and generations later everyone missing it might well have died out.
We use bacteria/yeasts/fruitflies for experiments for several reasons, aside from the obvious ethical one: because they mutate more easily and reproduce far faster and more numerously, we can watch the whole thing on fast forward. It may be hard to predict what happens to humans over 10000 generations, but we can watch that in the lab over a few days. Of course they are not exactly the same as humans, but the mechanism is similar, and we can observe the same changes happening slowly in humans, and thus extrapolate.
(You are free to take the hard empricist position, and disbelieve anything not seen with your own eyes. I hope you will not, because it implies disbelief
A critter is more than genes. There are also mechanisms to manipulate those genes
(Such a great example of stating something true but irrelevant.)
There are various mechanisms of mutation. If we interfered with the transcription checking, then that would also increase the mutation rate.
I don't know where you got this idea about increasing the temperature or the chemical reaction rate. We can do the experiment using mutagens or radiation to have the specific effect of causing mutations, and we can demonstrate they don't increase general chemical reaction rates and that a similar effect is seen whatever mutagen you use. (See for example this lab exercise.)
If we are not influencing the mutation rate, what is the mutagen changing? Is it just accelerating all reactions? No, we can observe that exposure to UV doesn't increase the reproduction rate or the metabolism rate.
Mutations can be beneficial as the environment changes. Indeed, even a mutation that looks neutral slightly deleterious at the time might turn out to be great a hundred generations later, when that bacteria is lifted into a different environment. Even if we suppose a vengeful god (or undergrad experimenter) was trying to cause random harmful mutations, some will eventually turn out to be useful.
You do realize your theory is inconsistent with basically all of modern microbiology and medicine? Feel free to propose an alternative, but it takes more than just saying "maybe you increased the temperature".
Please try to pay attention: If the adaptation was solely from selection of existing genes, then increasing the mutation rate would not increase the adaptation rate.
If the so-called "decay" of genes in bacteria leading to diversity makes it easier for them to adapt and survive in a new environment, then it is in fact beneficial mutation.
This is not speculation about billions of years ago; it's something you can observe in a highschool science lab. What's next? Are electrons unbiblical? Back to four elements?
If you want to believe in myths, just do it and don't try pretend there is any scientific evidence.
There is a difference between "we don't know everything" and "we don't know anything." Confusing the two is a favourite creationist tactic.
When someone proposes a better explanation than is currently available, I'd be delighted to read it. But most creationist stuff is not even internally consistent or well argued, let alone a good alternative or consistent with the facts.
Some bacteria already had this capability, and survived exposure to the "alien" environment.
Interesting theory, but wrong.
How did the bacteria (of the same species) get different genomes in the first place, if not for persistent mutations? If your theory that mutations are overwhelmingly bad was true, wouldn't they all have their original divinely-specified genome?
Why was the capability to metabolize man-made chemicals hanging around at all? Wouldn't it have degraded through genetic drift in the billions of previous generations?
It can be experimentally demonstrated that increasing the mutation rate also increases the adaptation rate to the new environment. It can also be demonstrated that the adapted bacteria have new genetic material, which could only have arisen from mutations. From these and other observations we can conclude that mutation is at least one important factor in adaptation. (Or maybe god reached in and fiddled with it with teeny tweezers just to confuse the scientists; without naturalism we can't rule that out.)
Destructive mutations cannot accumulate, because they would kill off the organism, or prevent it from reproducing, or at the very least make it less competitive.
There might be conditions in which natural selection didn't apply: if the mutation rate was so enormously high that almost no offspring were viable, then perhaps the destructive mutations would swamp them. But in that case everything would die off in the first generation.
If your theory were true, and things did get worse in every generation, we would expect the fastest-reproducing species to already be extinct. If bacteria can go through several generations in an hour, how could they possibly have survived for millions (or even thousands) of years if their genome monotonically degraded? Clearly there is some correction mechanism that compensates for destructive mutations.
How else would you account for bacteria evolving to man-made environments or developing antibiotic resistance?
Evolution of simple organisms has been directly observed so many times as to be beyond any reasonable doubt.
sha1 and md5 are generally considered so weak that they should only be used to combat error or accidents, not fraud.
Do you have any evidence for that? SSL, PGP and NTLM all depend on them, as far as I know.
Re:Unfortunately the SHA series seems to be suspec
on
SHA-1 Broken
·
· Score: 2, Informative
A better idea is to use UUIDs, where these problems have already been considered, and systematically handled. On Linux, just read from/proc/sys/kernel/random/uuid.
Re:So what's the big deal for the rest of us?
on
SHA-1 Broken
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
No, wrong. This weakness does not allow generation of text with a chosen hash. So the MPAA cannot insert corrupt blocks with the right SHA-1 into someone else's torrent. All they can do is generate their own corrupt torrents, but they (can) do that already.
The computer you're using, the chair in which you sit, the glass from which you drink are all less than twenty years old. What makes the planet and the universe different?
"Argument from false analogy" and "argument from disbelief" all in one paragraph. Google them if you care to know why they're invalid.
the thing that annoys creationists is when "scientists" want to pretend their naturalistic fairy tales are better than everyone else's fairy tales
Well, it has the advantage of being true. Maybe that doesn't matter to you, in which case you can choose whatever story makes you feel good.
Mainstream science is consistent with observed facts, goes some way to explaining those facts, and adapts in light of new information. Creationism is none of those things. Saying, as ICR does, that the Bible is infallible and completely authoratitive is anti-scientific from the word go. They simply cannot be taken seriously. You should never hear a scientist say that about a textbook.
I'm sure this does annoy creationists, which is one of the things that make them so funny, as is the idea that the whole "scientific" community (in scare-quotes) is engaged in a coverup.
Naturalism or empiricism is an axiom you are free to accept or reject. However, most of modern science is built on that axiom (or something like it), and if you pull it out you lose a lot of valuable knowledge, not to mention the computer you're using now. Personally I think it is a pretty good axiom, but if you want to believe god made the universe last Tuesday I cannot disprove it.
Saying evolution explains the differences between blue-green algae and man is just as silly as saying the earth was created by God in 6 days
Sorry, but you're wrong. It gives a reasonably good account, which I won't reproduce here as it's done in any number of pop science books.
(You can have an epistimological quibble about "explains". It is arguably impossible for any finite statement to explain the boundless detail found in the universe. One can always ask for more detail, and current scientific knowledge runs out at some point. But that doesn't mean it's a fairy story.)
The study of evolutionary biology in particular could probably be advanced by some pretty sick human experimentation.
You could say the same about medicine, or deep sea diving, or high-voltage electricity. Should we, therefore, have no medicine? What is your point?
understand and question the role of Naturalism in science
That is a valuable thing for a philosophy of science introduction, and I think I studied it at high school. The basic point is this: if we assume there are supernatural phenomenon that can magically intervene in the universe, it is hard to do any science at all. Where would we be if we still assumed sickness was caused by sin and cured by prayer, or flu by astrology?
Occam's razor favors the assumption that there are not, and fortunately science has been pretty successful working on that assumption. Of course even naturalism is a theory that could, in principle, be invalidated. Show a valid experiment whose outcome is (say) influenced by prayer, and you will have falsified the naturalistic hypothesis.
Although you say you want it, I suspect creationists/religionists would object to this being taught. Good science education is strongly correlated with skepticism.
Creationism and intelligent design are not "invalid ideas", merely "unscientific"
I'm glad to hear you admit that, given how often ID proponents claim to be scientific. I am not sure I understand your distinction between "invalid ideas" and "flat-out wrong".
Boundaries being things we're just not meant to understand? I hope they never do. Wilful ignorance is deeply unattractive, and arguably evil.
and say "I don't know" when appropriate
Scientists say that all the time, often followed by "but we're trying to find out". The thing that annoys creationists is that they don't say "I don't know, so I'm going to just assume your fairytale is right."
Of course, Behe's arguments have been laughed out of court by the mainstream scientific community. He might be right... but they also laughed at Bozo the clown.
Only by an intelligent designer, i.e., God could much of this be plausibly explained.
That's not an explanation, that's a lack-of-explanation. Start explaining at a detailed biochemical level how God might have tailored those molecules and then you'll have an alternative theory.
ID has two challenges: to show that evolution cannot account for observations, and to provide an alternative theory with better explanatory power. So far they have failed on both counts.
Here is a lay summary of observed evolution of an irreducibly complex metabolic path in bacteria. By past experience I expect the ID-ers will say, "oh, that's not irreducibly complex after all.... but look, superman!"
Right, but not asexually evolving cells; the genome is bound to the common germ line.
Another interesting thing is that higher organisms have associated asexual beings (gut & skin flora, etc) and to some extent their selection is coupled. If you have really bad asexual microorganisms living in you, you may not live well, and vice versa.
Very funny. But even in this worst of all possible cases, at least the mixed-up genes come from two organisms that managed to produce fertile offspring. They are, in a sense, more likely to be good than totally random mutations, and in some cases the combination might be better than either parent.
genuinely advantageous mutations are collectors items... which is why they are collected! (Or at any rate "accumulated" within lines of descent, if you feel "collected" implies too much intent.) You have, perhaps unwittingly, stated the main point.
Slashdot Mirror
Firefox with two tabs: 49,532K Opera with two tabs: 20,188K Opera with 13 tabs: 31,780K
Cost of 29,164KB of RAM: $4.00. Cost of Opera: $40.00. Software freedom: priceless.
(But hey, if Opera makes you happy, then I'm happy for you.)
Hemos lives in the US, and he recommends it. The flight from the US is not bad at all if you come for a week of conference and a week of holiday. See the great barrier reef!
Linux vs Mac OS X depends on how you measure it. Counting both servers and clients, I suspect Linux is ahead.
In terms of the relationship between laptops and big machines: I think relatively few Mac users really care about the fact that it's running Unix, and use it with big Unix machines. Obviously a lot of those on Slashdot will, but out of all users I think it's pretty low.
So Solaris is going to be a big competitor because it's nearly as good as Linux? How is that?
If they had got here say five years ago, when Solaris was still dominant in large IT, then I'd believe you. Many developers/admins were forced to Linux laptops and desktops because it's close enough to commercial unix, and they couldn't justify $8k for a decent workstation or the hassle of Solaris i386. But that battle has already been lost; Linux is now the standard, not Solaris.
I take it the 'tube' in your name refers to tube-based audio? I hope your analog audio advice is better-informed than your ideas about digital audio.
The difference signal you seek will be all zeros -- silence. There is exactly no difference, as others have explained. In practice, you will hear whatever noise your system produces in the analog stage when trying to reproduce silence. On an all-digital setup, it should be perfectly silent.
I like the way the favicon.ico for the Attorney-General's department looks like an orange three-eyed buck-toothed smiley. That gives the right note of absurdist humor.
The act covers any "representation, or description, for a sexual purpose, of a sexual organ or the anal region of a person under 18 years of age". So the troll (link?) that repeatedly posts the description of fucking his grandfather as a teenager is causing slashdot to distribute child pornography. tut tut.
Think for a moment: the behaviour of any particular molecule is not predictable, and yet we can predict the outcome of chemical experiments and draw solid conclusions about what is happening at the molecular level. Similarly with electrons or photons or what have you.
We cannot predict which individual bacteria will mutate, or how, or which ones will reproduce, but over hundreds of generations of millions of cells the result is deterministic. Perhaps 99.999999% of the mutations are bad, but the one bacteria that gets lucky will reproduce again and again until its children fill the whole slide. And so on and on, incredibly wasteful in one sense but nevertheless making progress. Obviously if you blast it hard enough you'll just kill them all, but that's boring and unrepresentative (at least until WW III.) The very fact that bad mutations do not get reproduced acts as the feedback mechanism.
We can tell that the result is due to a mutation for several reasons. Firstly, we can directly sequence the DNA and observe new patterns do exist in the succesful bacteria -- new information *was* created. Secondly, we can observe that the change persists even generations later, when the selective pressure is removed. Something is being passed through the generations that carries the information. (This was known to occur well before we knew that DNA was the (main) carrier.) In human terms: black people's children remain black even when they move to a cold climate; Irish-Australians remain prone to sunburn.
If it were a pre-programmed adaption turned on in response to the climate, it would not propagate through generations. Children of suntanned people are not born suntanned, and will never get suntanned unless they go out in the sun themselves. (They might have inherited a tendency to tan, or perhaps even a preference for sunny climes or outdoor work. Distinguishing different effects can be hard.)
Given enough time, skin cancer might well kill off all the Australians who are genetically prone to it, leaving only dark-skinned residents well adapted to the climate. This might take many generations, certainly more than the few dozens we can directly trace for humans. And of course given mixing through migration, and some ability to treat cancer, the effect might be hard to detect even then.
But you may say: well, this is just selection, not mutation. And indeed it probably is: mutation rates are rather lower in humans than bacteria, partly because humans have far fewer offspring and so can't afford to take big chances. (But why is the rate different? Because by evolving or relaxing checking techniques, species can tune their frequency of mutation and make themselves more safe or more adaptable.)
But it is selection of variations that originate in mutations: the first redhead was probably a freak, but it's harmless enough that they lived and reproduced, until now the gene is widespread in western populations, and common in some areas.
Mutations in humans have been directly observed -- genes present in parents and children but not grandparents.
Some people are apparently naturally resistant to HIV; this probably began as a mutation, but (at least in the absence of medicine) that mutation would be incredibly beneficial and generations later everyone missing it might well have died out.
We use bacteria/yeasts/fruitflies for experiments for several reasons, aside from the obvious ethical one: because they mutate more easily and reproduce far faster and more numerously, we can watch the whole thing on fast forward. It may be hard to predict what happens to humans over 10000 generations, but we can watch that in the lab over a few days. Of course they are not exactly the same as humans, but the mechanism is similar, and we can observe the same changes happening slowly in humans, and thus extrapolate.
(You are free to take the hard empricist position, and disbelieve anything not seen with your own eyes. I hope you will not, because it implies disbelief
A critter is more than genes. There are also mechanisms to manipulate those genes
(Such a great example of stating something true but irrelevant.)
There are various mechanisms of mutation. If we interfered with the transcription checking, then that would also increase the mutation rate.
I don't know where you got this idea about increasing the temperature or the chemical reaction rate. We can do the experiment using mutagens or radiation to have the specific effect of causing mutations, and we can demonstrate they don't increase general chemical reaction rates and that a similar effect is seen whatever mutagen you use. (See for example this lab exercise.)
If we are not influencing the mutation rate, what is the mutagen changing? Is it just accelerating all reactions? No, we can observe that exposure to UV doesn't increase the reproduction rate or the metabolism rate.
Mutations can be beneficial as the environment changes. Indeed, even a mutation that looks neutral slightly deleterious at the time might turn out to be great a hundred generations later, when that bacteria is lifted into a different environment. Even if we suppose a vengeful god (or undergrad experimenter) was trying to cause random harmful mutations, some will eventually turn out to be useful.
You do realize your theory is inconsistent with basically all of modern microbiology and medicine? Feel free to propose an alternative, but it takes more than just saying "maybe you increased the temperature".
Please try to pay attention: If the adaptation was solely from selection of existing genes, then increasing the mutation rate would not increase the adaptation rate.
If the so-called "decay" of genes in bacteria leading to diversity makes it easier for them to adapt and survive in a new environment, then it is in fact beneficial mutation.
This is not speculation about billions of years ago; it's something you can observe in a highschool science lab. What's next? Are electrons unbiblical? Back to four elements?
If you want to believe in myths, just do it and don't try pretend there is any scientific evidence.
There is a difference between "we don't know everything" and "we don't know anything." Confusing the two is a favourite creationist tactic.
When someone proposes a better explanation than is currently available, I'd be delighted to read it. But most creationist stuff is not even internally consistent or well argued, let alone a good alternative or consistent with the facts.
Some bacteria already had this capability, and survived exposure to the "alien" environment.
Interesting theory, but wrong.
How did the bacteria (of the same species) get different genomes in the first place, if not for persistent mutations? If your theory that mutations are overwhelmingly bad was true, wouldn't they all have their original divinely-specified genome?
Why was the capability to metabolize man-made chemicals hanging around at all? Wouldn't it have degraded through genetic drift in the billions of previous generations?
It can be experimentally demonstrated that increasing the mutation rate also increases the adaptation rate to the new environment. It can also be demonstrated that the adapted bacteria have new genetic material, which could only have arisen from mutations. From these and other observations we can conclude that mutation is at least one important factor in adaptation. (Or maybe god reached in and fiddled with it with teeny tweezers just to confuse the scientists; without naturalism we can't rule that out.)
Destructive mutations cannot accumulate, because they would kill off the organism, or prevent it from reproducing, or at the very least make it less competitive.
There might be conditions in which natural selection didn't apply: if the mutation rate was so enormously high that almost no offspring were viable, then perhaps the destructive mutations would swamp them. But in that case everything would die off in the first generation.
If your theory were true, and things did get worse in every generation, we would expect the fastest-reproducing species to already be extinct. If bacteria can go through several generations in an hour, how could they possibly have survived for millions (or even thousands) of years if their genome monotonically degraded? Clearly there is some correction mechanism that compensates for destructive mutations.
How else would you account for bacteria evolving to man-made environments or developing antibiotic resistance?
Evolution of simple organisms has been directly observed so many times as to be beyond any reasonable doubt.
sha1 and md5 are generally considered so weak that they should only be used to combat error or accidents, not fraud.
Do you have any evidence for that? SSL, PGP and NTLM all depend on them, as far as I know.
A better idea is to use UUIDs, where these problems have already been considered, and systematically handled. On Linux, just read from /proc/sys/kernel/random/uuid.
No, wrong. This weakness does not allow generation of text with a chosen hash. So the MPAA cannot insert corrupt blocks with the right SHA-1 into someone else's torrent. All they can do is generate their own corrupt torrents, but they (can) do that already.
What an incredibly silly argument:
The computer you're using, the chair in which you sit, the glass from which you drink are all less than twenty years old. What makes the planet and the universe different?
"Argument from false analogy" and "argument from disbelief" all in one paragraph. Google them if you care to know why they're invalid.
the thing that annoys creationists is when "scientists" want to pretend their naturalistic fairy tales are better than everyone else's fairy tales
Well, it has the advantage of being true. Maybe that doesn't matter to you, in which case you can choose whatever story makes you feel good.
Mainstream science is consistent with observed facts, goes some way to explaining those facts, and adapts in light of new information. Creationism is none of those things. Saying, as ICR does, that the Bible is infallible and completely authoratitive is anti-scientific from the word go. They simply cannot be taken seriously. You should never hear a scientist say that about a textbook.
I'm sure this does annoy creationists, which is one of the things that make them so funny, as is the idea that the whole "scientific" community (in scare-quotes) is engaged in a coverup.
Naturalism or empiricism is an axiom you are free to accept or reject. However, most of modern science is built on that axiom (or something like it), and if you pull it out you lose a lot of valuable knowledge, not to mention the computer you're using now. Personally I think it is a pretty good axiom, but if you want to believe god made the universe last Tuesday I cannot disprove it.
Saying evolution explains the differences between blue-green algae and man is just as silly as saying the earth was created by God in 6 days
Sorry, but you're wrong. It gives a reasonably good account, which I won't reproduce here as it's done in any number of pop science books.
(You can have an epistimological quibble about "explains". It is arguably impossible for any finite statement to explain the boundless detail found in the universe. One can always ask for more detail, and current scientific knowledge runs out at some point. But that doesn't mean it's a fairy story.)
The study of evolutionary biology in particular could probably be advanced by some pretty sick human experimentation.
You could say the same about medicine, or deep sea diving, or high-voltage electricity. Should we, therefore, have no medicine? What is your point?
understand and question the role of Naturalism in science
That is a valuable thing for a philosophy of science introduction, and I think I studied it at high school. The basic point is this: if we assume there are supernatural phenomenon that can magically intervene in the universe, it is hard to do any science at all. Where would we be if we still assumed sickness was caused by sin and cured by prayer, or flu by astrology?
Occam's razor favors the assumption that there are not, and fortunately science has been pretty successful working on that assumption. Of course even naturalism is a theory that could, in principle, be invalidated. Show a valid experiment whose outcome is (say) influenced by prayer, and you will have falsified the naturalistic hypothesis.
Although you say you want it, I suspect creationists/religionists would object to this being taught. Good science education is strongly correlated with skepticism.
Creationism and intelligent design are not "invalid ideas", merely "unscientific"
I'm glad to hear you admit that, given how often ID proponents claim to be scientific. I am not sure I understand your distinction between "invalid ideas" and "flat-out wrong".
If scientists can't learn to set boundaries
Boundaries being things we're just not meant to understand? I hope they never do. Wilful ignorance is deeply unattractive, and arguably evil.
and say "I don't know" when appropriate
Scientists say that all the time, often followed by "but we're trying to find out". The thing that annoys creationists is that they don't say "I don't know, so I'm going to just assume your fairytale is right."
Of course, Behe's arguments have been laughed out of court by the mainstream scientific community. He might be right... but they also laughed at Bozo the clown.
Only by an intelligent designer, i.e., God could much of this be plausibly explained.
That's not an explanation, that's a lack-of-explanation. Start explaining at a detailed biochemical level how God might have tailored those molecules and then you'll have an alternative theory.
ID has two challenges: to show that evolution cannot account for observations, and to provide an alternative theory with better explanatory power. So far they have failed on both counts.
Here is a lay summary of observed evolution of an irreducibly complex metabolic path in bacteria. By past experience I expect the ID-ers will say, "oh, that's not irreducibly complex after all.... but look, superman!"
Right, but not asexually evolving cells; the genome is bound to the common germ line.
Another interesting thing is that higher organisms have associated asexual beings (gut & skin flora, etc) and to some extent their selection is coupled. If you have really bad asexual microorganisms living in you, you may not live well, and vice versa.
minroly disabiling problem
Like dyslexia?
(No offense intended to dyslexics.)
Very funny. But even in this worst of all possible cases, at least the mixed-up genes come from two organisms that managed to produce fertile offspring. They are, in a sense, more likely to be good than totally random mutations, and in some cases the combination might be better than either parent.
genuinely advantageous mutations are collectors items ... which is why they are collected! (Or at any rate "accumulated" within lines of descent, if you feel "collected" implies too much intent.) You have, perhaps unwittingly, stated the main point.