What is an ID proponent's basis of comparison? (edited)

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What is an ID proponent's basis of comparison?

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The basis is the already know origin of specified complexity.

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quoteIn general an ID supporter does not first prove the existence of a deity and then from that point progress to evidence of intelligent design of the universe.

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That's because ID has nothing to do with deities.

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Instead they tend to point at a earthly phenomenon and proclaim that it could only have been created by an intelligent entity, and from that point conclude that their preconceived beliefs are supported.

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Unless you got some evidence that the pattern somebody claims is designed, can actually be produced by undirected natural process.

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Bear with me as I spell out this logical argument:

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Premises:
1) There are things in the world which are natural, and things which are designed.
2) Humans are capable of distinguishing with a high degree of accuracy between natural things and designed things.

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Logic:
1) ID supporter declares an example thing which most consider to be naturally occurring to be designed.

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Conclusion:
1) Everything that exists was designed.

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This is the most flawd description of ID though I have ever seen up untill now.ID starts with the know fact that only intelligence is able to create specified complexity. So when we do find specified complexity in nature, we conclude it was designed, because that is what in science is called an inference to the best explanation.

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Most discussions get hung up on disproving the "logic" portion of the debate, even ignoring the logical leap that the example cited is representative of the whole of reality (Inductive Fallacy).

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Actually what you proposed was a strawman which has nothing to do with ID logic.

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I would instead like to focus on the crucial fact that the proposed conclusion disproves the premise itself. *IF* the entirety of creation was designed then there are no natural occurring things with which to be distinguished from designed things.

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That would be true if that was actually what ID claims.

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Therefore the declaration of an ID supporter that something was clearly designed inherently contradicts their proposed conclusion.

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No, it doesn't becuse ID claims that only some features of the universe exhibit patterns which can be said to have been designed.

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Hence my question: If you believe that everything was intelligently designed, what is your basis of comparison?

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Well I don't believe that everything is designed obviously. So my basis for comparison is the distinction in patterns that natural processes can create, and what intelligence can create.

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Edit: "Therefore the declaration of an ID supporter that something was clearly designed inherently contradicts their proposed conclusion."

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Agaon, your strawman argument does that, not the actual ID framework.

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I suppose I got a bit wordy here, what I was trying to say is this: By making this argument an ID supporter is assuming something in their argument that they ultimately conclude to be false, making the entire argument invalid.

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You are constantly repeating yourself. Yes, we got it.

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The logic is sort of like this:
1) A and B exist, and can be distinguished.
2) B is distinguished in one case.
3) Therefore, B in all cases.

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My point is not that one instance of B cannot be extended to the whole of creation. My point is fundamental to logical argument itself; if you disprove a premise of a logical argument then the argument collapses. In the above arguments the first premise, if true, makes it impossible to reach the conclusion through valid logic.

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What I am interested in is how an ID supporter avoids this problem in their arguments.

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Simple, we just don't use your logic that you think we do use...

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When you say 'already known' I take it you mean 'we know that all specified complexity must be created by a designer'. But you can't take this as your start point - this is what ID has to demonstrate, based on evidence.

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Umm... but that is my starting boint because it has been demonstrated for the past few thousand years by every single living person alive.Specified complexity (CSI) is defined as more that 400 bits (the newest estimate) of information. Every person who has ever written a letter has created CSI, and therefore made it clear that intelligence can indeed create CSI. No natural process has yet been seen to do this. For an example, I present this:

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Scientists today announced that they have crafted a bacterial genome from scratch, moving one step closer to creating entirely synthetic life forms--living cells designed and built by humans to carry out a diverse set of tasks ranging from manufacturing biofuels to sequestering carbon dioxide.

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The scientists ahve, by using their intelligence, actually created a bacterial genome from scratch. They produced information from scratch. This is evidence that intelligence can actualy produce CSI.Longest Piece of Synthetic DNA Yet - Scientific American

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Use of evolutionary techniques in generating Robot control algorithms, electronic circuits, animal gait models etc shows that information that specifies these things can be generated by exactly the same methods as evolution itself uses (mutation, selection, reproduction).

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Actually it can't. This doesn't show an undirected natural process. This shows that intelligence has produced those robots, circuts etc. What you need is an evolutionary process without an intelligence guiding it. In the production of all those objects an intelligent agent was guiding the process all the way. It was supplying it with active information to get to the desired goal.It doesn't matter what mechanism was used, meaning, if the process was similar to what you would call an evolutionary process. The point is that an intelligence was guiding it. The process alone without any input from inteligence like in the natural world could not have preformed this task and generate CSI.

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This shows that the concept of specified complexity is in principle not a problem for the evolutionary approach.

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No, what this shows is that for evolutionary algorith to produce CSI, you need an intelligent input first. That is called intelligent design.

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So there is good evidence against your position.

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Not really. You should read Wolpert's work on NFL theorems. [quote]The inability of any evolutionary search procedure to perform better than average indicate[s] the importance of incorporating problem-specific knowledge into the behavior of the [search] algorithm.[/quote]He basicly explains how for any kind of algorith, including evolutionary algorithms, you need to input information first to get any information out. An algorith by itself is useless unless it uses an intelligent input.CiteSeerX — No free lunch theorems for optimization

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The concept of specified complexity is widely regarded as mathematically unsound and has not been the basis for further independent work in information theory, complexity theory, or biology.

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This is a statement, not backed up by anything. If you have no arguments than please leave.

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No, ID starts with the assumption that only intelligence is able to create specified complexity.

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Depends on how you define a "fact", and an "assumption". To me, a fact is an idea backed up by observations, an assumption is an idea backed up by nothing. Since intelligence has been observed to create CSI, I'd call that a fact.

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There is no reason to hold that assumption, all things with specified complexity that have been created by humans are created by humans. That's just a tautology.

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But that's not what I'm saying. What you said is clearly a tautology. But what I'm saying is that since only intelligence is known to create CSI, than it means that when we find CSI, it is apropriate to infer an intelligent cause. This is called an inference to the best explanation. This is actually what Charles Darwin and Charles Lyell used in their scientific discoveries.

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Studies in the methodology and philosophy of science have shown that many scientific theories, particularly in the historical sciences, are formulated and justified as inferences to the best explanation (Lipton 1991:32-88, Brush 1989:1124-1129, Sober 2000:44). Historical scientists, in particular, assess or test competing hypotheses by evaluating which hypothesis would, if true, provide the best explanation for some set of relevant data (Meyer 1991, 2002; Cleland 2001:987-989, 2002:474-496).10 Those with greater explanatory power are typically judged to be better, more probably true, theories. Darwin (1896:437) used this method of reasoning in defending his theory of universal common descent.

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The Origin of Biological Information and the Higher Taxonomic Categories | Discovery Institute

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You have no logical basis to jump from "all human created specified complexity" to "all specified complexity" and no logical reason to jump from "created by humans" to "created by intelligence."

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Yes I do since only intelligence has been seen to create CSI. Let's test my idea, shall we?Imagine that you were walking in a desert, and you stumbled upon a car. What would you conclude? That somebody, a person designed it and left it here, even though there are no people around you. Or would you conclude that it was created by a natural process? Obviously you would conclude that it was designed by people, because your previous experiences tell you that people design cars. That's called an inference to the best explanation. It's the same thing with intelligence and CSI.

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All this is faulty reasoning stemming from a desire to prove a conclusion, rather than following the evidence to a conclusion regardless of preconceptions.

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And what's my conclusion? And what is the evidence I am not following?

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As such, it is not science, it is religion.

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Depends on how you define religion.

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So, leaving out living things for a moment, how many bits is an igneous rock (let's say, the size of a baseball), or a star (let's say, the sun)?

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We do not know. CSI is a suitable measure for biological information because it works with digits. There are no digits in a Sun or a rock, so we can't say. Unlike DNA which is a digital code like the code on a computer.

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Are these things designed or not? I mean, they're pretty complex, depending on how you look at them.

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We do not know, since we can not measure their amount of CSI.

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Also, where does this 400 bits estimate come from?

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Well the first estimate was 500 bits, but the new one is closer to 400. It's from Dembski's new book The Design of life.For an older estimate, read this article.

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These 500 informational bits are derived from Dembski’s Universal Probability Bound of 10^-150 using:

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Information(Event) = -log2Probability(Event) or I(E) = -log2P(E)

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This UPB is based upon the maximum possible physical reactions in the universe (# of particles, duration of the universe, etc). A probability event that exceeds the UPB is considered by statisticians to be one in which chance is precluded.

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http://www.overwhelmingevidence.com/...than_a_thousand_wordsThe new estimate of 400 bits comes from the work of Seth Lloyd. The maximum number of bit operations the universe could have produced from the supposed Big Bang is about 10120. Which translates to 400 bits of information.

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Merely by existing, all physical systems register information. And by evolving dynamically in time, they transform and process that information. The laws of physics determine the amount of information that a physical system can register (number of bits) and the number of elementary logic operations that a system can perform (number of ops). The universe is a physical system. This paper quantifies the amount of information that the universe can register and the number of elementary operations that it can have performed over its history. The universe can have performed no more than $10^{120}$ ops on $10^{90}$ bits.

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http://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0110141

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No one ever denied that. We know humans can make things. Pretty darn complicated things. But just because we can replicate something we find in nature doesn't mean that thing in nature was intelligently designed.

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Actually it does. That is, using scientific reasoning, our methods say it does. Becasue there are some features, a certain patterns that we find in nature that we know only arise from an intelligent cause. So by using the method of inference to the best explanation, we infer that when we see CSI in nature, we conclude design.

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Houses are not proof that an "intelligent being" made caves.

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Exactly, because the caves do not exhibit the patterns we need to infer design.

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Algorithms obviously need input by definition, obviously. But why "intelligent input"? How can an algorithm recognize the difference between input from an intelligent source and input from an unintelligent (a-intelligent?) source?

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It can't, but that's not the point. The point is that only the intelligent input is going to produce CSI through an algorith. Becasue an intelligent source knows what it's goal is, and how to achive it. An unintelligent cause, does not. It has no teleology, so it can't point in the right direction to a specific goal, which is CSI.

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Hey SO, welcome to the fray. I think you'll find that this website is more or less dominated by the evolutionist side of the debate. Still, even though I'm an ID advocate, I find this forum intellectually stimulating and occasionally educational. Good luck.

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Hi there. I'm fine with the majority being evolutionists. It just means there will be more debate for me! Hope we all just get along fine though...

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Yes, that's a fact. Extrapolating from there that ALL CSI si created by intelligence is a leap in logic, and asserting it does not make it a fact.

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Why is it leap of logic when ONLY intelligence has been seen to create CSI. What else has been seen to create CSI? What else do you want to say can create CSI? What?

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You are assuming it to prove your point when we have no reason to believe it's true, and in fact, we have evidence to the contrary.

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a.) Define an assumption.b.) Where? Where is the evidence to the contrary?

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But, it's not the only way to create CSI. That is another assumption. Evolutionary programming is a new field of programming, but it has created many novel ideas, without being created by intelligence, unless of course you consider a computer to be intelligent.

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Wrong. Evolutionary algorithms do not produce new CSI. Didn't you read all my posts on this topic? I explicitly explained why. Read my answer to Peepul about the evolutionary algorithms.EvC Forum: Message Peek

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But still, it's unfounded to jump from "some" to "all."

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That is becasue ALL CSI that we know it's origin, has been from intelligence.

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How could you even begin to come up with the probability of a random action happening?

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Like a dice toss? Well the probability of a dice thrown and a 6 landing is 1/6 since there are 6 faces to a dice, and all have equal probability.

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This is wrong. In general, there is no relationship whatsoever between the Kolmogorov complexity of a string and its probability of occurrence.

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Actually there is. if there string has more bits, the chances some event will happen is smaller. if we have a dime that has 2 sides (representing 2 digits on a string), the probability of one event happening, let's say "heads" is 1/2.On the other hand, if we have a dice with 6 sides, and we want a number 3 to come up when we toss it, the probability is 1/6. The more sides, the less the probability. Obviously there is a connection.

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Another comment that immediately comes to mind is that if a search is assisted by information from a higher-order space, the search algorithm that has acquired such information is not a "black-box" algorithm any more, so the No Free Lunch theorems, at least in the form they were proven by Wolpert and Macready, are invalid for such algorithms. (Wolpert-Macready's proof was valid for black-box algorithms. A black-box algorithm has no advance knowledge of the fitness landscape and acquires such knowledge step-by-step, extracting it from the fitness landscape in such a way that it accumulates information about the already visited points in the landscape but still has no knowledge of any points not yet visited; it possesses no knowledge of a target either, if the search is target-directed.)

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Neither does the evolutionary algorith have any information about the landscape, so it is the same thing.Those first two links you posted have mistakes. The last one doesn't even mention Specified Complexity, so it is obvious to me you do not even know what you are talking about.

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Actually, ALL CSI that we know the origin of has come from humans, thus it's logical (according to you) to say that humans have designed all CSI?

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No. An intelligence is what I'm claiming is the cause, not humans.

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The problem is, the CSI we know the origin of is because we're the origin. You're looking at a skewed sample set and asserting that the sample is a representational one, which is just false.

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But there are no other know sources. What other source is there?

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RAZD likes to bring up his red car fallacy. If you look only at red cars, you can then say that all well-made cars are red, because all known well-made cars are red. This is fallacious, and just because we don't know where the other CSI comes from, you can't assume its from source A without any evidence.

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No since, there is nothing in those red cars that specifically makes them well-made. A red car by definition does not ahve to be well made.

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Assumption: Something believed to be true for the purpose of argumentation, or a claim asserted without evidence.

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Well my evidence is that the only known cause of CSI is intelligence.

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Evolution. We have seen evolution in action. We have seen new information made in the lab.

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Evidence?

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What mechanism do you propose that would stop information from arising naturally?

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The NFL theorem says so. It has been tested and it shows that algorithms do not rpoduce new information.

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Define intelligence then.

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The ability to plan ahead and create and modify information.

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The whole point of these algorithms is to take us out of the equation.

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But they were designed, that's the point. They are guided by an intelligent input. They are not the ones creating new information.

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They are allowed to go on their own, without input or guidance from us.

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Wrong. The target specified to be found, and the constraints on the search space of the algorithm are the intelligent input.

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Unless you assume the computer is intelligent, and in that case, an environment is intelligent, because the computer works in exactly the same capacity in these cases as a natural environment does on life forms.

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No, I do not assume that. I know for a fact, that the whole system of the computer and the algorith has been designed to do the job. And it has been designed by an intelligence.Edited by Smooth Operator, : Not done...Edited by Smooth Operator, : Not done...

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I knew you would misunderstand this. No. I mean, the odds of a cosmic ray streaking from a nova thousands of light years away, diving through our atmosphere and hitting the germ cell of an animal, and that germ cell then developing into a new life form. Or, how about a transcription error during DNA replication? These are random events, which unlike the dice toss, are not initiated in a non-random way and for which there are not a finite number of possibilities.

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Actually the universe is deterministic in it's laws, so everything is basicly non-random. You need a reference class of all posibilities and the replicational resources to calculate a certain event.

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Here's another example. How about I'm sitting at my computer writing a story. My girlfriend calls to me from another room, so I lose my concentration while typing, and instead of saying, "She walked across the room." I type, by mistake, without intelligent direction, "He talked across the room." This is still a valid sentence, but it now says something completely different. The information has changed and is a different length, so the amount of information is different. If this can happen in our instance, why can't it happen in DNA.

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Either thinking jsut because you are not aware of what you were doing for an instant, you already had the idea, that is, information in your mind, and you materialised it by typing. You performed an intelligent act. There is nothing strange about it.

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Again, what is the mechanism you postulate that would stop that from happening?

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Nothing, it was an intelligent act.Edited by Smooth Operator, : No reason given.

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But you're looking for a specific number or side. The real question is, when we roll the die, what are the odds that some number of dots will be on the upward face? 1. What are the odds when we flip a coin that one of the sides will be on top? 1.

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That's correct.

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Evolution doesn't drive toward a specific goal, the odds of something happening approaches 1, and that's the problem with calculating odds: What question are you asking and how are you calculating those odds?

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The odds are not 1 because we are looking for a biological function. Not just any combination of DNA sequences. We are looking for those that give us ne biologic functions. I know that evolution is not directed. That is why it can't produce new biological functions, i.e. CSI.

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For DNA, what are the odds that a specific Adenine will be switched to a Cytosine? Well, it would be 1 divided by the number of bases in the DNA strand times the mutation rate times 3. But that's the wrong question. What you really should ask is, what are the odds that one of the bases on the DNA will be changed during transcription? Again, the odds approach 1.

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No, the question relevant to evolution is, what is the probability of getting a new biological function.

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But why are you being so vague? We know, specifically, that all CSI we know the origin of is from humans. Why do you get to decide how vague we are?

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I'm not vague. The problem is that humans also exhibit CSI and therefore could not have designed themselves.

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I could say, humans are natural, thus all CSI is natural, but you would have a problem with that, I assume.

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Because there are no known natural processes that create CSI.

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Mutation is a big one.

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Mutation is a schnge in a position of a nucleic acid. It is the same source of new information as if a CD got chiped by a CD-ROM. It's a source of loss of information, not gain.

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What stops mutation from creating new information in DNA?

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The lack of teleology.

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And even if I didn't have such an obvious response, you're arguing from ignorance, which is a logical fallacy. Just because we don't know of an option doesn't mean the option doesn't exist.

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How can I be arguing from ignorance when I have evidence for intelligence being able to create CSI?

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You're assuming we have all possible information at our disposal to answer this question. Why is that?

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No I do not. I'm making an inference to the best explanation. That's what science is supposed to be doing. I could be wrong. But theories in science come and go. That's how it is.

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No, but some of them will be, others won't be, but all well-made cars, as far as we know, are red, if we're only looking at red cars.

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But there is nothing in those red cars that specifically ties them to being well made.

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No, the only known cause of CSI is humans. Do you have evidence of other intelligences making CSI?

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But what in humans is that makes CSI? I don't need evidence for other intelligences. I extrapolate on what is already known. The higher the intelligence, more CSI it can produce. So it's obvious that there should ba an even higher intelligence for the CSI that humans didn't produce.

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I don't know what the NFL theorem is, to me NFL is National Football League. How can it be tested? It's asserting an absolute, and absolutes can't be proven. Besides, what stops an error from occuring in DNA, or in a manuscript for that matter?

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If you read the link I posted to you few posts back you would know. NFL is a No Free Lunch theorem. [quote]The inability of any evolutionary search procedure to perform better than average indicate[s] the importance of incorporating problem-specific knowledge into the behavior of the [search] algorithm.[/quote]It explains that no evolutionary algorith can produce new information unless it takes in intelligent input first.CiteSeerX — No free lunch theorems for optimization

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The algorithm was designed, but the output wasn't. That's the whole point. The output wasn't designed by intelligence.

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The output was predisposed by the design of the algorith itself. The algorith ran it's course, and got the desired output. All the information the algorithm needed to produce the output was already in it. It came there from the intelligent input that built it. The algorithm itself produced no new information. The only thing that the algorith did was transform and process the inputed information to output the desired information.

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But the algorthm could be deisgned anyw ay, and it would still create output.

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Nope. It would create an input but it could be wrong. You need a cpecific input for a cpecific output.

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Whay can't an environment act in the same way as the algorithm?

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Becasue the environment has no ability to plan ahead and produce new information and buid such an algorithm.

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What makes the intelligence the deciding factor, rather than the fact that there are constraints, regardless of why or how they got there? You're focusing on the least important part and kaking it the most important.

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That's because it is the most important part! The constraints are defined by an intelligence for a specific goal! That's the whole point. You yourself said that evolution has no goal. Meaning it has no constraints. Which means that mutations will happen randomly. They will not be constrained to a specific goal to produce a specific biological function.

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Evolution (actually random mutations) produces new biological functions all the time:

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Nope. Evolution has never been known to produce new information.

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Bacterial resistance to antibiotics or bacteriophage

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This is loss of information.

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Bacterial resistance to the antibiotic, rifampin, can result from a commonly occurring spontaneous mutation. Rifampin inhibits bacterial transcription by interfering with normal RNA polymerase activity (Gale et al., 1981; Levin and Hatfull, 1993). Bacteria can acquire resistance by a point mutation of the -subunit of RNA polymerase, which is encoded by the rpoB gene (Enright et al., 1998; Taniguchi et al., 1996; Wang et al., 2001; Williams et al., 1998). This mutation sufficiently alters the structure of the -subunit so that it loses specificity for the rifampin molecule. As a result, the RNA polymerase no longer has an affinity for rifampin, and is no longer affected by the inhibitory effect of the antibiotic.

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Look at table 1. You will see, that all accounts of the supposed gain in information from the resistance to antibiotics is actually a loss of information. The mutations made the proteins brake down, or loose the afinity to bond witht he antibiotic. And that's how we get the resistance. Not by making new structures and biological functions, but by braking them.http://www.trueorigin.org/bacteria01.asp

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The ability for some human adults to digest lactose

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This is not the product of gaining new information by evolution. This is more akin of switching a light swithc from "on" to "off". There is a specific mechanism that does this in people.

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However, lactose deficiency in adults is not in fact abnormal, but the norm! Research has shown that the gene for lactase normally switches off as children are weaned. And a genetic mutation that results in lactase production not being switched off accounts for the ability of certain people to drink milk into adulthood.

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Lactose intolerance - creation.com

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Just to name a couple extensively documented ones.

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It seems you were wrong.

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It is incorrect to state that evolution is not directed. Evolution IS directed, by natural selection. The same way the flow of a river is directed by gravity and the surrounding landscape. However, there is no end goal of complexity (which is why >99% of life on the planet is microorganismal).

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My not-directd, I mean there is no goal in mind.Edited by Smooth Operator, : No reason given.

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But you're jumping to unwarranted conclusions. We have exhibit A: all CSI with known origins is created by humans.

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We have exhibit B: CSI we don't known the origin for.

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How do you go from these two exhibits to "Some other, unknown, unseen, unevidenced intelligence created this CSI for which we have no evidence for the origin of?

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Because there is currently no better explanation.

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Mutation is a change, an addition, or a loss of a base or group of bases. In your CD example, to make it more appropriate to biological mutation, you're copying the CD onto your computer. While it's copying, you jump really hard on the floor, and the CD skips back a couple millimeters. The recording software keeps recording, but now you have a duplicated part of the data you were copying. Well, what do you know, it's a gain in information. Amazing how that works.

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Not quite. You have more complexity, but not more specified complexity. To have more information you need both more complexity and more specificity. This would increase what we would call the statistical part of information. Only the amount of bits needed to record it. But you have no more of semantics, and that's what you need also to have new CSI.For an example:MY HOUSE IS BIG!This is information. If I duplicate this 4 times, I wil get this:MY HOUSE IS BIG!
MY HOUSE IS BIG!
MY HOUSE IS BIG!
MY HOUSE IS BIG!Did I get new information? No, I got more LETTERS, but they give me the same amount of semantics, that is, meaning, as the previous version. Yes, you ahve more statistical part, but that is obviously not enough. You need both complexity and specificity.Now for the third example, we are going to increase the information.MY HOUSE IS BIG!
AND IT HAS A RED ROOF!As you can clearly see, you have more statistical part, and more semantics than in the first case. Not only do you know my house is big, but you also know it has a red roof. Now this is real increase in information.

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And, lest you say, but the jumping is an action by an intelligent agent, a CD can skip through technological malfunction, too. Just as the DNA copying mechanism can "skip" back and recopy a portion it has already copied. This is an increase, a gain, more information than was ther before.

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No, it's more nnucleotides, not necessarily more information. New nucleotides do not equl new information as same as new letters don't equal new information.

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You have humans creating a specific subset of CSI, and other CSI for which we have no evidence on the source. You are then positing a source and claiming it si the only option.

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I'm not saying it's the only ultimate option. I'm saying it's the only current option. This is called the inference to the best explanation.If you saw an icecube, whould you conclude that it's temperature was cooled down by some source to less than 0C? Just because you didn't see it happen, would you conclude that even though all icecubes up 'till now have been under 0C, that this one is over that temperature?What I'm doing is called the inference to the best explanation. If you dont' like my method than take it up with Darwin because he also used it.

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You have a lack of evidence and are using that as evidence in itself.

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What lack of evidence? Did you actually see every singel life form evolve from the first cell?

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If I have very sensitive weather equipment that shows that weather near the ocean shore is affected to a large degree, perhaps even created, by the interaction of the water and the air, and that's all the weather I look at, am I scientifically sound in saying that, because all weather I know the source of is from ocean water interacting with air, that all weather is created by ocean water interacting with air? When someone points out to me weather being created over mountains, and I assert, there must be some type fo ocean water floating above the mountain that we can't see, am I making an argument from ignorance, or am I making an inference to the best explanation? You're doing nothing more than my misled weather person.

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Well it is possible for other sources to create a specific result, but untill we find them there is no reason to invent them. If you didn't investigate other source, than you are arguing from ignorance. But we have investigated other sources and they have been shown not to be able to do what intelligence can. So untill we find them intelligence will be the only known source. I'm not saying there aren't any, but we have no good candidates for now.

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Life on this planet is predisposed by the enviornment in which it develops.

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No it is not. The enivronment does not dictate life to arise from non life. Just as ink and paper do not dictate to themself and predispose a novel.

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Evolution ran its course, and got the desired output. DO you not understand using an experiment to mimic natural events?

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What?

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Yes, new information came from the algorithm. In one case, they wanted to get a better walking program for a robot. They started with what they could come up with on their own, and then let the computer work it over from an evolutionary standpoint. The computer came back with a novel program to create a novel walking style that the scientists had never seen, never considered, and wouldn't have been able to come up with on their own. In that case, the random mutations did better than an intelligence.

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No. You don't get it. The algorithm by itself would be able to do nothing unless it was fed information about the problem from the start. It's like a really big calculation. People just don't have time to do it, so they let the computer do the work for them. But untill you made the computer and the algorith, you can't make it do anything.When you type in 2+2 in the calculator, and it gets you 4, did it produce new information? Did the calculator itself produce this n umber 4? No it didn't. It has been programed before to give you this number.It's the same with the evolutionary algorithms. They have been programed from the start with vast outcomes. And some of those combinations of outcomes, the scientists don't know if they will be usefull. But non the less all the information is already in the computer. So since the scientists can't bother with the calculations, because it will take to much time, they let the computer do it's job and select the best possible combination. But as I said, all the combinations are already in the machine. The evolutionary algorithm just picks the best one becasue it is too much tiresome and time consuming for scientists to do it hemselves.

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OK, fine. I'll reset the example. You have a field of well made cars at a Ferrari enthusiasts convention, but you decide to only look at red cars. All the cars you look at are well made, they're all Ferraris. "Hmm, every well made car I know the color of is red, therefore, all well-made cars are red."

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Wrong, since we have already looked at other sources in nature and found them lacking.

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Again, you're assuming your conclusion here ecause you want there to be a higher intelligence.

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You are assuming you know me.

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You have no higher intelligence in evidence, in fact, you have one example of intelligence.

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The CSI in living organisms points to a higher intelligence. It's a logical necessity.

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So, you have one intelligence make a certain type of CSI. How can you infer from that that a higher intelligence would make more?

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Becasue we see in people that those with higher intelligence can create more than those with less intelligence.

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How do you know this? Are you assuming it? What CSI, made form a known higher intelligence do you have with which to compare our own?

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It doesn't have to be known. Because a design by logical necessity means there is a designer.

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Why does it need to plan ahead?

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So it can get the desired goal.

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It only needs to plan if a single output is the desired end point. If any end point can be an end point, then it matters not what path things take, thus no planning ahead is necessary.

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Yes, but not all outcomes are biolocically relevant. And only some are better than other, and those are the ones you specifically need.

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If you want to get form your house to the Grand Canyon, you need to plan a route, perhaps trying to get their faster or more efficiently than other paths. If you merely want to be somewhere else, and it doesn't matter where, there's no need to plan, you just go, and viola, you got there!

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True. And do you need specific nucleotide positions for specific biological functions or not?

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See that, you said it yourself, "specific goal." There is no specific goal, there's just a variety of possible outcomes, and one is what actually happens. We're not the goal of the universe, we just happen to be what ended up here.

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That is your assumption, save it for later. Anyway, if we are talking about biological reality, there are only specific outcomes that will work. So yes, there is a specific goal.