A thought on Intelligence behind Design

Really the best arguments for design - in general - rather than applied to biology - are those based on the intentions and capabilities of the designer.This is true even of SETI - SETI makes explicit assumptiosn about the sorts of designers they are looking for.So, since the idea that living things look as if they have been designed for a purpose has been raised it is worth asking what that purpose would be. Because there is not much sign of a purpose at all.

Well the title is my point. An intelligent designer has some purpose of their own in mind. Therefore examples of intelligent design should be seen to serve the ends of the designer.THere are two important reasons for bringing this out. Firstly it shows how the ID movement does not follow the usual methods for identifying design, and secondly to show the difficulty of producing a coherent ID view (something that is rather important if ID wants to be a real scientific alternative to evolution).

I can explain what Warren means.Since Warren is pretending that the "ID theorists" aren't arguing that the flagellum could not evolve he has to pretend that the arguments that the flagellum could evolve are arguments FOR evolution rather than counters to the claims of Behe and Dembski.When you think about it is quite simple - he covers over the evidence that shows that he is either grossly ignorant of ID or outright lying while turning it into a false attack on his opponents - which is his main line of approach here.

Thanks, Warren for finally admitting that you were wrong.Now if I remember correctly didn'd Dembski go further in _No Free Lunch_ claiming that he did not even have to calculate the probability of the flagellum evolving becauseit was IC ?

Human creativity can act in some ways like evolution - that is, we can do "descent with modification". However there are differences.In a New Scientist article a while back there was an article on "evolving" an electrical circuit to perform a particular task. The experiment had worked but the result was not a human design - in fact it was quite hard to comprehend since it had apparently used side effects of the presence of some components as an essential part of the design.In a more recent article there was a discussion of Niles Eldredge's attmept to produce a phylogenetic tree of the cornet. Because the designers were copying each other's innovations it was a lot harder to produce a tree showing the ancestry than it was for trilobites and the tree looked rather different.So there are real differences between human design and the workings of evolution.

That looks right - here's the one I was referring to :Page not found | New ScientistSadly the other article is not so easily available.

Rather than suggesting that I am making an error in thinking in a "reductionistic" fashion perhaps you should give the issues a more thorough examination than the simple binary classification you use to dismiss one of the examples I have given.(And don't knock reductionism - it is one of the reasons that human creativity can do what evolution cannot, as shown in the second example I gave).Instead of simplistically classifying all examples as "intelligence" or "non-intelligent forces" we can try a three way classification (although we should recofgnise that these are pints on a continuum).1) The direct work of human intelligence2) Humans employing non-intelligent forces to do the actual work3) Non-intelligent forces operating on their own.Now let us be clear that in the second class the non-intelligent forces are producing the actual design (or whatever the object of the exercise is). This is clearly distinct from the first class - and it is a distinction you are ignorning..Now Thompson's experiment was a case of the second class, and it produced results vey different from direct human design - confirming that the distinction is important. What is more it directly contradicts your assertion that the experiment supports the idea that human intelligence and evolution produce similar results - it could only do that if it had produced something that was like a human design.So your assertionis based on a simplistic binary classification which lumps together every case where humans are involved without considering the nature of that involvement and on ignoring the actual results.I remind you of the proverb concerning glass houses and stones.