Intelligent? design

Studying science for many years, I always had trouble with the leap from primitive micro-organisms to small creatures to bigger creatures to man. Yet if I had been taught intelligent design, I don't think I could have bought that either. I suppose that's my biggest problem with being Catholic:

"Do you believe in God, the all-mighty createor of heaven and earth?" My sister had to answer "yes" to complete her RICA.

The more I understand about how the immune system works, I am even further amazed by its complexity and effectiveness. And this is one small system of the human being. Let's just focus on the ability to develop a functional immune system - if it was a Darwin type event and the one creature with the functional immune system spontaneously formed, how would breeding with others "dilute" out that function? And how could one "perfect mutation" affect all subsquent creatures?

Yet, I'm expected to believe that hundreds of millions of years ago, someone understood all these intricate biological processes and used their knowledge to encode a functional immune system into a human and other creatures?

I came across two interesting articles today. The first from the BBC reports the possibility that today's HIV strains reproduce at a less effective rate than HIV from the late 80's The second counter arguments to intelligent design.

Due to the high rate of mutation of HIV, it does make for a good model to study genetic drift over a period of a few years (instead of a couple thousand). It does provide the hope that perhaps in the next few decades, HIV will cause its own extinction. I'm sure the same thing happened to many other species over the millions of years that we can prove life existed on this planet.

So, what do I think? I think that there's the ability to adapt within our genetic structure. Possibly related to introns, I don't know. I think that there's a complex balance of molecular interactions that keep everything in biochemical balance and set the "ground rules" for basic life functions. But there is an amazing ability to alter other non-essential life functions that continue to this day. Evolution is not dead - it happens so slowly that it's difficult to observe. Studying DNA from fossil records is a way to study evolutions in a time lapse sort of way.

Okay Ms. Smarty-Pants, so how did life begin? I think that the basic "building blocks" of living organisms travel the universe and "seed" themselves on all kinds of planets. This fortunately happens to be a fertile ground for such seeds and help align in a functional manner to begin life. I don't think we'll ever find a fossilized record of the first micro-organisms to prove this theory.

Yet, it's possible that micro-organisms may eventually be found on Mars - perhaps the same seeds also ended up on Mars. But the planet Mars was not a fertile ground for sustaining early life, and the micro-organisms died out. Am I supposed to believe that an intelligent desided to create life on this planet and let it flourish, but give up on Mars? Why go to all the trouble to create life, but let it become extinct? It's more of a convincing argument (to me) that Mars was an evolutionary dead end.

Wouldn't it be incredible to possibly extract DNA from the fossilized micro-ogranisms and see how much of a similarity there is to ancient DNA from this planet?

This is assuming of course that we do find proof that these micro-organisms did exist on Mars someday. Don't know if they still do or not....