Is this Intelligent Design or not?

There's been some fascinating work in this area of artificial evolution within and outside of biology.One issue frequently neglected by evoltuionists is that when these systems are considered it is often found that the initial set up is designed to achieve the result. When the set up is slightly changed, you don;t get the result! SO yes, the result is encoded in the intial set-up automatically.The classic example is the 'Life' computer simulation. This simulaiton which generates non-random patterns turns out to only work from one or a handful of rules chosen out of trillions of possibilities. I had this told to me recently by an evolutionary astrophysicist collegue.Genomes are fantastic examples of this. It looks only marginally different from a random genome and yet it will lead to a self-developing organism complete with eyes and limbs and a brain.[This message has been edited by Tranquility Base, 09-02-2002]

Well, regardless of whether it was designed to do it or not (OK - I se it wasn't) the point is that we all know that a series of tranistors will produce an amplifier or an occillator or a radio receiver if the right combinaiton is hit on. (Do you realise a radio receiver is simply an RF amplifier with a rectifier?). It's the same deal with biochemistry - of course if you put the right mix of stuff in a soup you'll get amino-acids. BUt 30 years after those classic experiments we haven't come any closer to getting life from soup.So email here when they get a TV working this way or a microprocessor.