Perhaps not, but you certainly have a knack for picking up their arguments.

You'll excuse me if the assertion that '[evolution] does not account for speciation' caused me some confusion, since speciation is one of the focal points of evolutionary theory and is rarely used to describe anything other than macro evolution. But now that you've elaborated your meaning, it's really nothing more than the same 'adapts not evolves' crap I've been hearing from creationists for years.

Onto the chicken analogy: of course it's easier to go from chicken to flying chicken — that's the whole point behind evolution! You don't go from an amoeba to a chickadee in two generations! But let me be serious here. Firstly, invoking the necessity of flight-worthy muscular, skeletal and neural systems is pointless: those have been in place since vertebrates first evolved. (Will we have to cover that process, too?) Brains, bones, nerves, and muscles were around long before birds were and they tend to work in pretty much the same way no matter what critter you stick 'em in. What, you think birds' brains interact with their skeletal muscles in some fundamentally different way than, say, a cat's?

But let's talk about wings, since that's the crux of your argument. Now, obviously, you don't go direct from a flightless organism to a generation of birds with maladjusted wings. The most likely starting points would either be a 'flightless' glider with some sort of airfoil or a bipedal jumper using its forelimbs for thrust/stability. From there, the function of the proto-wings would evolve toward full flight along with the rest of the organism's body (lighter bones, increased muscle mass powering the wings). Members of the species not trending toward flight or sporting less-than ideal flight adaptations would either take a different evolutionary path or die off. The whole flight package as we see it today wouldn't come about overnight. As for flightless birds, what you're looking at there are not failed flyers but the descendants of flyers who found niches where flight wasn't necessary (ostrichs, kiwis) or who can fly for short distance but are discouraged from doing so by humans who find it inconvenient (chickens with clipped wings).

Of course dogs and cats are still dogs and cats: we've never had any desire for them to be anything else. Sure we've tampered with their aesthetics, but that's mainly the result inbreeding forcing (and exaggerating) the expression of recessive traits. Plus they get to breed pretty freely, which actively discourages speciation. But, yeah, if you really had a yen for a flying cat, it could probably be done with a couple hundred years of work. Go Cat-Bat!

DNA is the text, precisely. It is not, as you suggested in your first post, a designer. It has no agency but is instead modified by the 'dimensionality' of selection.

The why of molecules has nothing to do with evolution. Understand that I am referring to a very specific definition of evolution here: changes in allele frequencies within a population or the ways in which life adapt to their environment. The reasons why molecules, atoms, electrons, quarks, etc. behave they way they do has no bearing on the matter. Yes, life is an amalgamation of non-living atomic particles, but that isn't relevant to the super-atomic interactions between organisms. Even if there is a higher order governing the laws of physics, it is still only the framework that allow life to exist — the ways in which organisms interact with each other and their environment is an independent matter.

My point was that your assumptions about the age of the universe being twice as old as stated is flawed. If we can see a star fourteen billion light years away, it did not take twenty four billion years for that light to reach us: it took fourteen billion. Even if a star were moving away from us at the speed of light, it would not affect the time that it took its light to reach us at any given point (i.e. light emitted at ten light years away from us would still take ten years to reach us regardless of how fast the star was moving when it reached and passed that point); it would just have an increased wavelength. And do you have any sort of proof that light has a fifteen billion year expiration date, or are you just guessing?

I have two problems with your 'random chance' statement. The first is your obvious conflation of the 'randomness' of evolution and that of the beginnings of life (abiogenesis)and it's atomic underpinnings. The second is that evolution is not random. That which works, survives; that which does not, dies. The variation is random, but the way in which it is directed, if you will, is not.

Now, funnily enough, I have a fairly good understanding of evolution. Why, then, don't I have the sudden urge to replace it with some mystical pseudo-creationist rigmarole?

So verelse thinks it makes no sense to believe any scientific theory because it'll just turn out to be wrong in a couple hundred years' time, and brightstar posits that we may or may not live in a simulation wherein evolution may or may not have occurred and which may or may not have an intelligent being pulling the strings? Well that certainly puts my mind at ease. Time to crack open Of Pandas and People and let Michael Behe have his way with our public schools because, you know, it doesn't really matter, does it?

Argumentum ad temperantiam. Bugger it an everyone who pretends to be the voice of reason because they're too enlightened to take a position on an issue much less, in brightstar's case, reality.