Distinguishing "designs"

That's not so much a problem as rather the beauty of it. The closer we can model evolutionary algorithms so as to precisely mimic biological evolution, the better we can compare the types of design they both produce. If we then find that the design characteristics of evolutionary algorithms closely match those of biological evolution, then we have a strong case against ID in the sense that the products of evolution themselves are almost certainly not intelligently designed, even if we're not sure whether or not the process of evolution as a whole is designed.

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"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science." - Charles Darwin.

What you call straightforward logic, most people would call common sense. And whereas logic is a rigorous tool that requires a certain amount of skill for its proper use - which not everybody can muster - common sense is what it says on the box: common.But the trouble with common sense is that it's usually rather superficial in its rigor. For example, it is common sense - at least, it was for thousands of years - that the sun rotates around the earth. Everyone can see that the sun moves through the sky and that the earth is fixed. But when you dig deeper and apply real logic to the data, as people started to do one day, you can come up with a better explanation, one that also accommodates for some anomalies that common sense conveniently ignored, or tried to explain away with fantastically elaborate ad-hoc reasoning. (An example being the retrograde movement of the planets.)It is the same with the apparent design in the biological world: common sense tells us that the design we see in nature points to a designer. We conclude this because we are so used to seeing design in our own society and always knowing for certain that there is a human designer behind it. So, naturally, when we encounter the appearance of design in nature, we seek to identify the designer.But we forget that there may be other possible explanations: it may be that the design we see is just a simile of design, i.e. that what we see is not really design, but just looks like it. It may also be that it is real design, but that this real design can also arise without the need for an intelligent agent. Before we conclude a designer, we should first investigate these possibilities.Personally, I am leaning towards the second possibility. I think that the human eye, for example, is an organ that is designed for seeing. It has a number of specialized parts that work together in a precise - but emphatically not perfect - way to achieve the objective, which is to produce images of the outside world and send them to the brain.But the evidence about the development of the human eye points to a haphazard process in which it gradually evolved from simple beginnings to what it is now, en route taking some wrong turns, which the process of evolution is principally unable to correct. An example of this haphazardness is the so-called "blind spot", where the optical nerve goes straight through the retina. The human eye would be better designed if the optical nerve did not have to pierce the light-sensitive layer. But once it has evolved that way, there is no turning back. Had there been an intelligent designer involved, the design would probably not show these characteristics.In conclusion, I think that the design we see in nature is real design, but a blind process is responsible for it, rather than an intelligent designer. I come to this conclusion because, to my mind at least, there is no doubt that some structures are designed towards a specific use, but this design also shows evidence of a gradual, automatic generation. Parsimony then demands that without further evidence we should not posit an intelligent designer.Edited by Parasomnium, : No reason given.

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"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science." - Charles Darwin.

Not only that, but it indeed prevents us from making the mistake of inferring things we don't really need in our explanation. That's why what you say next is so surprising: I'd say that for parsimonious reasons we should not posit a designer if we can have a simpler explanation - in this case evolution - but here you go, not only positing a designer, but evoking the designer's intentions as well, thereby stacking one unparsimonious assumption onto another. Why don't we suppose that maybe the designer's mother-in-law had something to do with it? Or the designer's troublesome bowel movements one particular morning? Or perhaps the designer was a three year old, mucking about in the sandpit, who knows?The list of things we could consider is endless, and it goes from bad to worse if we allow combinations of those things to enter into it. So that's exactly why we have the principle of parsimony: to curtail our fantasies on what might and might not be elements of our explanation. Best to keep it as short and simple as possible.Besides, you are also turning the ID argument around: after first inferring a designer from excellently functioning living things now it becomes OK to make the same inference from poorly functioning living things. Odd, that. There's only one answer to that, I suppose: "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder." Of course, I never said that. But it's nice to see that you're making progress.

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"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science." - Charles Darwin.

Why not? Cool down Brownian (i.e. random, chaotic) motion and this is what you get: And this is what mathematicians investigating chaos theory stumbled upon: To me, both have a very "designed" look about them. But I'm not weird about it. I don't tie myself up to insist there must be some thinking entity behind them. That's what cursory glances tend to do, making things seem implausible. Take a better look and check out "strange attractors". They have "uniformity deriving from chaos" written all over them. Please stop making this argument, you've been around this forum long enough to know that evolution only comes into play when things exist, no one claims that evolution also explains the origin of the universe. Here's how males and females may evolve from an asexual being:(Step 1) Forget to recombine your single helix before splitting off a cell
(Step 2) Combine two single helix cells into one double helix cellThis is sexual reproduction by uniform sexes. A good start.Now, with the same amount of resources you can either:(Step 3a) Make your sex cells smaller and more numerous (sperms)
(Step 3b) Make them bigger and less numerous (eggs)More numerous sex cells give the genes they contain (an identical set for all of them) a better chance of succeeding in finding an egg. Bigger sex cells give the genes they contain (again, an identical set for all of them) a better start in life. Both strategies are advantageous for the respective sets of genes that cause them. Mutations in the direction of either strategy will be favoured by natural selection and the sexes will diverge. This is a process that can proceed by numerous minimal steps, obviating claims of irreducible complexity.

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"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science." - Charles Darwin.

The "inkblot" is in fact the so-called Mandelbrot set, a graphical representation of a mathematical object in the complex plane. There's a world of mathematics behind it, which you can explore if you Google "Mandelbrot". The bottom line is that there is beauty and "design" in the set on which you keep zooming in. I found a nice site about the Mandelbrot set that has a very nifty Java-applet to explore the set. You'll be amazed, I promise you.What I meant by showing you these picture is that simple, but above all unthinking, principles, can lead to eerie examples of seemingly designed structures. If you look into the subject of strange attractors, you'll find that some deterministic laws yield chaotic behaviour which sometimes settles down in uniformity. It's beyond the scope of this thread to go into any further. Not so much convenient as rather a simple fact. In the opening post, NosyNed specifically limited this thread to biological design/evolution. Just as difficult as any other organ. In the beginning there may not even have been sex organs because fertilization took place in water. Later, just bringing the gametes together by close body contact might have been enough. Later still, some indentations/protuberances might evolve, et cetera. Evolution proceeds in many small steps, remember?

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"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science." - Charles Darwin.