Why Reuse Design?

And you're advancing this supposed trend of getting "dumber" as a reason why people re-use design?Then apparently the "dumber" they get, the more they resemble your all-wise creator.Surely some mistake here?

One of the most basic examples is the relationship between the amino acid and the anti-codon in a molecule of tRNA. Here is a picture of one: Now, can anyone tell me why the tyrosine residue on one end has to match up with the GUA at the other end? I can't find any reason whatsoever why this relationship must exist. It is arbitrary. So for each separate creation there is no reason (other than limited knowledge, limited time, and limited resources) that anyone would reuse this relationship.

Well, chemistry is chemistry.

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Anyone so limited that they can only spell a word one way is severely handicapped!

It seems you and Taq want to have your cake and eat it to. This threads question is ''why reuse design ?'' and for the in fact the conversation had become basically ''a designer who reuses design would be limited''. But now in your post you state lots of examples where designs could have been reused but haven't, instead ''time after time living things reinvented the wheel''.You seem to want to argue against the existence of an intelligent designer based on the fact that designes are been reused, AND based on the fact that new designs are started from scratch even though one could have been reused.Of course, both logical pathways are irrelevant. A designer can sometimes reuse a design in a situation, and the same designer can decide to start a whole new design in another situation.And in both situation, we should be able to determine by looking at the object i nquestion if it was designed or not. Living things, according to me, show design.

So why is anything reused, right down to codon usage? Why is novel design limited? There are no organisms that have been started from scratch. All life shares common characterstics, or for this thread reused designs. Why? Is God not capable of making an entirely new genome with new codon usage as easily as God could change a genome by 2% to make a slightly modified ape like us? It would seem that for a being with infinite knowledge and power making a 2% change from a chimp would be just as easy as building everything from scratch.

Yes, we know that you have said that.The question is, "what shows design and why should anyone even care if there was a designer?"

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Anyone so limited that they can only spell a word one way is severely handicapped!

I think an important point is that existing pieces parts often get reused, and often pressed into different duties. We see jaw bones become ear bones, arteries that supplied blood to a gill reused a the supply for the larynx, toe bones become hooves; lots of examples of just using pieces parts that were already there for a new function.But we also see totally different solutions evolve for common functions. As mentioned above there are a host of examples showing different solutions for the same function.What we DON'T see is what we do see in human design. We do not see the good idea that is developed in one design implemented across the whole line. Just look at the variety of great or at least optimal designs that exist in animals. We don't see the human mind design used in all the mammals, the Vicuna's blood system that carries more oxygen duplicated across all mammals; what we do see is "just good enough to get by" is the norm, not optimum or even good design.

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Anyone so limited that they can only spell a word one way is severely handicapped!

I'm afraid that I'm at a slight disadvantage, since I had duty this past weekend, plus worked today, and during the weekend when I was free the forum was down.I have worked professionally as a software engineer for the past 27 years. Whenever you start a project, ... let's leave that situation until later.It is relatively rare that you can start a completely new project from scratch. More often, you get assigned an existing project to maintain. This can be the case both when you have been working there for a while and when you are newly hired (in my five jobs since 1982, the first two were on new projects (the second one was design work before coded ever got started), and the other three were on existing projects).Here's what happens when you maintain a project. You learn how the original design works. Then management wants you to add a new feature, so you need to add that new feature in a way that still agrees with how the application already works. Then another feature, and another. With each new feature, you take what's already there and you modify it to handle the new feature. It's an evolutionary process; an existing feature is modified or copied-and-modified to perform a new function, all while keeping all the previous functionality intact. It's kind of like a croc growing to the point where his three-chambered heart becomes a four-chambered heart ... without ever skipping a single heart-beat.The result of such an evolutionary process of software development is ever-increasing complexity that approaches irreducible complexity -- research in genetic algorithms have shown that irreducible complexity is an expected result of evolutionary processes. What that means for the software engineer is that the software becomes ever increasingly complex and gets to the point where any change you make, regardless of how small, could have disasterous effects on the application's operation -- that is why regression testing is so vitally important, assuring that all other functions have not been adversely affected by the "fix".OK, new project time. A new project presents itself. In most cases, this new project is very similar to existing projects, yet also quite different. The temptation is to take one of those similar existing products as the new project's baseline and just modify it slightly. The problem with that is that the baseline project brings in all its "irreducible complexity" baggage. The engineers' most highly desired approach is to jettison all that baggage and to start from scratch.Cases in point. At my first job, towards the end (before the gov't cancelled the project), I was given two other programmers' applications to maintain. In those days (circa 1982-1985), the DOD had mandated the use of a new programming language, Ada (named for Ada Augusta, Lady Lovelace, the world's first computer programmer whose birth-year, 1815,was incorporated in the language standard's designation, MIL-STD-1815). Part of that mandate was the use of a validated compiler (a compiler that supported all features of the language specification), which did not exist at that time. So aerospace contractors at that time were using the Pascal language, which kind of was the basis of the "Green Language" (the competition used colors to identify them; the Green Language won, so the MIL-STD-1815 document was bound in green). At my first civilian job, I was unique in two major ways: 1) I was a Computer Science major, 2) I came out of school with two years experience in Pascal.In the case of the first programmer's code, she was experienced in FORTRAN, so she had coded all the repetitive actions by placing that code in-line every time it was used, rather than following the structured programming approach of turning that repetitive code into a function and then calling that function. Her code was easy to convert over to the Pascal way of thinking.The other programmer's code was much more of a problem. His experience was in assembly language. And he had decades more experience than either of us had. His approach was to have one main loop and several flags (BOOLEAN variables), the TRUE/FALSE values of which would determine what actions would be taken during each pass through the main loop. His code was my first exposure to irreducible complexity, and I was supposed to make changes to it! One thing I learned in the Air Force was that you never want to come to your supervisor with a problem; rather, you want to come to him with solutions to that problem. So I took that pseudo-assembly code and translated to Pascal-like structured code. Then I approached my supervisor with the problem and was able to show him that the converted code I had created from it did the same thing as the original code. Thus I was able to do something that I have never ever since then been able to do: completely rewrite unmaintainable code. That almost never ever happens.Engineers almost never have any say as to what design approach they will make. That is because such a decision is almost never an engineering decision, but rather an economic one. In the project I currently work with (ignoring that there are more than 20 versions of it), consists of more than 100 source files and could easily consist of 100,000 lines of code or more (lines-of-code is a largely obsolete metric, more amenable to FORTRAN than to C). It takes time to develop each line of code, and to test it. If you were to start each project from scratch, then the time and work it would take would be prohibitively expensive, plus the code you would have generated would be untested and probably full of bugs. So the safer approach is to keep the things that are the same (and already proven) and just change the parts of the code that need to be changed.And that is the approach that management dictates. Even when starting a new project from scratch would be the better way, the cost of that approach would be too prohibitive to take. Like that croc transitioning from a 3-chambered heart to a 4-chambered, a company needs to stay alive throughout any transition -- eg, possibly, Kaypro was one of the premier CP/M microcomputers and they announced their next model, the KayPro II, that would obsolete their first model, but then they ran into development delays and ended up going out of business because everybody was waiting for the KayPro II and wouldn't buy a KayPro I. What company can afford the massive expense of developing from scratch the next generation of an existing product? Know why new drugs are so expensive? Because they have to amortize the development expense; ie, the expense of developing the product needs to be recuperated, so it gets factored in the the product's price. Otherwise, the company takes a loss and goes out of business -- or at the very least will never have any reason to do R&D.OK, there are some truths about the human design process and the economics involved. How do they translate of an omni-present, omni-potent Creator?Reusing previous designs is a human thing. But a "godly" thing? Human fallibility dictates that designing from scratch is necessary, but an omni-potent god is not limited in such a manner -- it's too much work for too much time with too many bugs introduced for mere humans, but not for God. Economic concerns absolutely dictate the route that engineers will take, practically forcing them into the evolutionary tract. What omni-potent God could ever be forced into such a course of action? IOW, God could not possibly be forced into the design restraints that mere human engineers must constantly contend with.So what do we see in the natural world? Can "God" do His designs any damned way He pleases? Or are His designs always constrained by evolutionary processes?It is always the latter case.PS
Just to make the conclusion more clear.We humans reuse and modify previous designs because of our limitations. An omnipotent god would not have any such limitations.Human engineers are constrained very greatly by economic concerns, such as the need to greatly shorten the design time and effort and cost. An omnipotent god would not have any such concerns or constraints.Many times engineers would prefer to start from scratch rather than to wrestle with an existing design that has grown overly complex to the point of approaching irreducible complexity, but their bosses make that decision and engineers must obey their bosses. Who would be the boss over an omnipotent god?Sometimes, even the bosses agree to allow their engineers to start from scratch. Or to replace major portions of an existing design with an entirely different design. Or even to merge together two entirely different designs. Of course, an omnipotent god could do that anytime and at will. An omnipotent god could even perform a major overhaul without any concern for keeping the affected lifeform viable throughout the entire process.So while there are many constraints placed on human designers, there are no conceivable constraints that could be placed on any omnipotent supernatural designer. So why do we not only see constraints having been placed on nature, but we see far greater constraints being placed on nature than even human designers have to work with? While designers of any stripe, human or divine, can make arbitrary decisions in the design and can replace major sections at any point of the design, there is nothing arbitrary in what we find in nature, nor any changes that didn't arise from the previous versions of the design. And while designers of any stripe, human or divine, can go back in and clean up the design, removing old unused portions (eg, we frequently go back and delete old code that had been commented out), we continually find old unused designs in nature (eg, genes in birds for teeth).Edited by dwise1, : PS

As I had just posted, engineering decisions are not engineering decisions, but rather economic ones.My father graduated from high school circa 1934, in the depths of the Depression. In my recollection, he was a master carpenter and general contractor, but for a time during the dust bowls, he was apprenticed to his plumber uncle in Oklahoma -- he told me of how they needed to be back home by a certain time of day (2 PM?), because after that time the dust dunes would block the entrance to their garage. He also told me that in Oklahoma the gas stations were giving gasoline away practically for free; all you had to pay for was the gas taxes ... and for water. Yes, gasoline was practically free, but you had to pay for water.For that matter, when I started driving circa 1969, gasoline cost about 19 cents per gallon. Gas was cheap. Were there ways to conserve how much gasoline we used? Yes. Was it worth the effort? No! Hell no!When my father worked during the Depression, carpenters worked for just a little more than a dollar a day. Nails cost more than carpenters did. During the Depression, contractors would hire workers whose job it was to pick up the nails that the carpenters dropped. It was economically feasible. But then over time, you ended up having to pay that guy more to pick up the dropped nails than those nails were worth, so now it was no longer economically feasible. The only time we had to worry about dropped nails was when they dropped into swimming pools, where they would rust.OK, so we wasted braking energy in automobiles for over a century. So what? For the vast portion of that century, the cost of recuperating that lost energy would have been greater than any possible energy recovered. It's only been within the past few decades that such a savings could have possibly meant anything at all.Nowadays, yes, it is very important. In the past? Whom are you trying to kid?

IOW, we see modification of previous designs instead of designing from scratch. The bird wing is a modified dinosaur forelimb. The bat wing is made up of modified mammalian phalanges. So on and so forth. So we see that reuse of design also falls under another level of restriction, that of a nested hierarchy. Even humans do not restrict themselves to such a rigid pattern of design reuse. It would seem that the supposed designer is even more limited than humans.

Which gets me to the point I was trying to make. When ID supporters state that "reusing design makes sense" they are taking a anthropic view, not a God-like view. It is my opinion that this anthropic view is actually the antithesis of the the God-like view where it concerns design. The anthropic approach to the question of reuse of design is based on the differences between humans and deities (at least the omnipotent and omniscient ones).When ID supporters claim that reusing designs makes sense we should challenge it. It doesn't make sense, at least for an omnipotent, omniscient designer that resides in a realm outside of space and time.

Well, not even that.If someone asked me to design a butterfly, I wouldn't start with the design for some kind of lobster and then tinker with it. I wouldn't do that. An Intelligent Designer wouldn't do that. There's only one thing I know of that would do such a damnfool thing, and that's evolution.

That's part of it. We do not see good ideas like radio then implemented across the spectrum, in homes, cars, boats, planes, ipods, trains, space stations.But the other issue is the oft raised one of Optimal.What we see in living things is NOT optimal design, but rather "Just good enough" design. We do not see very many truly new pieces parts or functions show up, they are the exception rather than the rule. What we do see is incremental changes that seem to be without reason or purpose that are then tested by natural selection with a very simple pass/fail test. If the change keeps the critter from living long enough to reproduce, then that specific example of that change and critter is eliminated. It does not mean though that the very same change is not tried over and over again.To some extent biology and very early human invention follow the same course.Take the issue of keeping warm.Being able to create a fire meant that humans could light the night, cook meat, warm the cave, keep predators away, create whole new food supplies like bread and beer.The tribe that could do it had a distinct advantage over the tribe that could not. But the method for starting those fires was not necessarily the optimal one, it was the one that worked. It is far easier to start a fire with a flint spark then by rubbing stick together or finding a still burning tree that had been struck by lightening, but all three methods did work, and so all three methods were used.Very soon though the human mind developed the idea of optimal and that is where "intelligent human design" differs from "biological design". In living things, changes are just made then filtered and it is only the really, really bad designs that get filtered out. The designs are kept as long as they are not so bad that they keep the critter from reproducing.Humans though look at each design and ask "How can we make it better?" There really is a goal, a purpose to human designs that is not seen in living critters, the search for the optimal solution.Human designs also get transferred across the spectrum. A good design in one model of one make of car is soon adopted by every model of ever make of car. A good design like radio that initially was meant as a way to transmit information from one fixed location to many stationary locations is then soon adopted by mobile as well as stationary location and eventually made two way so we can talk across the optimal spectrum, one to many, many to one, stationary to mobile, mobile to stationary, mobile to mobile, many to many, one to one.When we look at Intelligently Designed things and Biologically Designed things we definitely see two different processes.

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Anyone so limited that they can only spell a word one way is severely handicapped!

But what we don't see yet is the consequences of trying to perfect our designs. Wait a minute, yes we do! Technology advancement is reducing the number of people it needs to operate companies. High unemployment rates is skyrocketing. Perfection in the long run does not insure the survival of species over a long period of time. Short term success is what perfection offers. Nature has experience on its side and history is its tract record of long periods of stability.Humans do not care about the future because they are going to die anyway. Comparing perfection to creation is ridiculous. The only ones believing that life should come from a perfect being with perfect creation skills is religious people or people that use that belief against them.

I don't think I mentioned perfection.

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Anyone so limited that they can only spell a word one way is severely handicapped!