Q, I think you'd enjoy a book by Niles Eldridge that I got for my birthday,
Darwin: Discovering the Tree of Life. It outlines Darwin's life and the processes that led to the publication of
The Origin of Species.
I mention it particularly in this thread because in the final chapter, Darwin as Anti-Christ: Creationism in the Twenty-first Century, he discusses what we would expect to see if biological systems were intelligently designed. He shows a traditional cladogram for Devonian trilobites and compares it with a cladogram illustrating the "evolutionary history" of the cornet.
The cladogram for the cornet shows mixing and matching of different design features from one to another, information transmitted "horizontally" between different models, in short, a complete departure from the nested hierarchy that is the hallmark of the cladogram of any biological series.
Let me illustrate the idea this way. A cladogram of the automobile would show similar features appearing at similar times in completely unrelated makes and models of cars, because as new features are developed for cars, all cars incorporate them. Compare that to biological cladograms, where we never see features appearing at the same time in different species, nor do we see pre-existing species developing features from newly appearing species.
If my garbled account of this idea is hard to follow, get the Eldridge book. He makes the idea quite clear.
His basic point is that adaptation in biological organisms only travels downstream, but adaptation in designed systems travels across all boundaries in all directions, precisely because there's an intelligence behind the process. That's how Eldridge looks for intelligence and work and, finding that absent in biological systems, he concludes there's no intelligence at work.
Those who would sacrifice an essential liberty for a temporary security will lose both, and deserve neither. -- Benjamin Franklin
We see monsters where science shows us windmills. -- Phat
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