When does design become intelligent? (AS OF 8/2/10 - CLOSING COMMENTS ONLY)

Hmm...the problem is that we can both cite many animals that apparently design structures, but are they intelligent? Is a bower bird intelligent and can it be said to design the 'bower', or is it simply mechanistic processes under unintelligent 'reflex' action?It strikes me that this is an inefficient way of tackling the OP central question which is much easier to address.The simple answer is 'it need never do so to the best of our knowledge'. We have oodles of examples of non-intelligent design all around us in both the living and non-living world. Snowflakes, crystalline symmetries, the fibonacci series in plant leaves and many other naturally evolved structures....etc. Since we know from direct observation that complexity can arise from non-intelligence, and we know that complexity is normally an indicator of design, then it is not possible to say 'stucture x is a result of intelligent design' with any degree of rigour or certainty.

I'm not the one you need to convince.BUT...I am one of them folk that think them Bower Birds are pretty smart, certainly smarter than the Intelligent Designer.

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Anyone so limited that they can only spell a word one way is severely handicapped!

One possible line of attack would be:
OK - complexity clearly doesn't require design, though interesting it does tend to indicate life (life is massively more complex than non-life in the universe. Even an Amoeba is hugely more complex than a star or planet).
So are there any criteria which we can set for design - even before addressing intelligence. Are there some apsects or characteristics which certainly tell us something was designed?
What about symmetry? Nope - happens all the time in nature.
Regularity? Better - nature doesn't do regularity very well most of the time. We don't tend to see very good triangles or even straight lines in natural structures. But we see close approximations and we certainly see other regularities, so this isn't going to work as a test.
Materials used? Not really. We can't say that because something is made from a lot of different materials that it was designed. Many natural structures are quite complex in terms of constituent materials - think of a meadow - how many elements are present? A lot, from the various minerals in the rocks, to the complex organic mix in the soil and the even more complex organic chemicals in the plants and animals on the surface.
What about being 'fitted for a particular purpose'? That would seem promising. Clearly if something is good at doing a paticular job or role, then it must have been designed for the job? Nope. Again nature shows us fantastic examples of evolution producing adaptions and adaptive behaviours.Nope, we can't do it - no 'set in stone' givaways of design. We have to use a non-algorithmic approach - no simple set of rules.
So is it possible that William Paleys 'watch on the beach' was not designed? Certainly. The function is arbitrary and wouldn't necessarily indicate purpose to anyone without a 24 hour period of rotation, it just has straight bits which move in a regular manner around a circular face, which are driven by lots of round wheels and a coiled spring. Maybe it evolved?On a slightly more serious aside - very few items in our modern world were designed from scratch. Most are adaptations of existing concepts or designs. Thus a building has no overall 'intelligent designer'. Rather it has a large number of designers and a large amount of evolutionary structure in the makeup.

Personally, I would say that intelligence includes the capacity to learn. I'm not sure why cdesign proponentsists think that's an appropriate trait to attribute to their god.

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Life is like a Hot Wheels car. Sometimes it goes behind the couch and you can't find it.

PS the argument from design, thoroughly discredited and rebutted as it is, gets very boring after a while, but it does have some interesting off-shoots.
One of them is what Dennett calls the 'stances' which can be used to explain the evolution of religion and spirituality. This is related to the religious notion of design.
Consider an early hominid ancestor. He/she has three basic ways of looking at particular phenomena available (3 'stances').
1) Physical stance. Look at the comonents, see how they fit together. In short, do the physics.
2) Design stance. Look at the phenomenon and see if it was obviously designed to do something.
Now, this is a short-cut. Working out the physics of something is hard and takes time. If we shortcut that by assuming it is designed then we can save time.
3) Intentionality stance. Look at the phenomenon. What are its intentions? What does it want to do?
This is an even faster shortcut. Simply predict what the intent of the phenomenon is and you have immediately classified it.Dennett argues that the latter of the three can account for superstition evolving and developing into organised religion.
Consider our hominid and the 3 possible stances. Which one offers the best chance of survival when he/she meets a tiger?
1) Examine the claws, teeth, size, shape, mass. (by now the tiger has chomped our hero).
2) Hmm...this creature looks designed for a purpose. Large claws and teeth. Purpose is to kill other animals. (if our hero is lucky they will arrive at this masterly summation quickly enough to run and survive).
3) This bugger looks like he wants to eat me, I'm off.Clearly the third is the best from a survival point of view. Therefore it is selected for - the assigning of 'intent' to things grows.Now, like all such predispositions, it will inevitably 'misfire' - that is, intent will be assumed for things which have no intent. So a bad storm clearly must be explained as something intentional. This requires an agency. So we invent an agency who 'intended' the storm and that tells us whether the storm is something to fear.
Likewise the Sun - clearly an important entity because whenever it goes away we get cold and can't see very well. Therefore there must be some agency who likes us and makes it appear.You can see where this is going, I'm sure ;-)..Edited by Bikerman, : No reason given.

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Personally, I would say that intelligence includes the capacity to learn. I'm not sure why cdesign proponentsists think that's an appropriate trait to attribute to their god.

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I would agree that learning is involved, certainly to gain the knowledge needed. But is it required simply to demonstrate intelligence? Yes, I would say it is. Any organism must adapt to surroundings which means it has to 'learn' about where it is and what its relationship is to the environment. So I think 'ability to learn' MUST go into the box.As regards theists having problems with this - it is mainly the Abrahamic religions that have the most problem, because they overplayed their God card and made it omniscient and omnipotent. It is simple to demonstrate that an omniscient being cannot learn (it is also fairly simple to demonstrate that omniscience+omnipotence = paradox+logical fallacy).
I could give you a formal proof of either, but it is very dry reading...Edited by Bikerman, : No reason given.

Hi Dr, I would expect many here to make such a false statement as this. But you are not one of them.Especially when Professor Gerald Joyce, reiterated that "while the self-replicating RNA enzyme systems share certain characteristics of life, they are not life as we know it. What we've found could be relevant to how life begins, at that key moment when Darwinian evolution starts,"That is why he has not been the toast of the town and up for a Nobel.God Bless,

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"John 5:39 (KJS) Search the scriptures; for in them ye think ye have eternal life: and they are they which testify of me."

Err...how does this relate to the point made - that life has already been made?
Ventners team did not use RNA, they replaced known DNA with synthetic copies, made by a combination of recombinance and repeated sequences. They then incorporated the new synthetic DNA into a host cell and voila. That IS life and it IS synthetic, there is simply no debate to be had on the matter.I think there may be some confusion about who was claiming what, but I read the sentence to refer to Ventners recent announcement that they (his team) had created artificial life. They were perfectly correct.Edited by Bikerman, : No reason given.Edited by Bikerman, : No reason given.

Hi jar, I did not say it was a model.I did say it was my mechanism.Mechanism definition: 1 a : a piece of machinery b : a process, technique, or system for achieving a result.So God creating the Heaven and the Earth is the process by which the Heaven and the Earth began to exist.Now if He had wanted to give away the trade secrets He could have told you how He did it.Since He did not then you are free to try to find out how He did it.God Bless,

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"John 5:39 (KJS) Search the scriptures; for in them ye think ye have eternal life: and they are they which testify of me."

Your definition of model is woefully incomplete.
Scientists use models all the time - they are explanations, with supporting maths, of a phenomenon or group of phenomena.
Model can also be:
a smaller imitation of something
an exemplar - a fine example of a type
someone worthy of imitation;
a representative form or pattern; "I profited from his example"(and quite a few other possible uses including artists models etc).

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So God creating the Heaven and the Earth is the process by which the Heaven and the Earth began to exist.

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That is neither model nor process. It is simply assertion.Edited by Bikerman, : No reason given.

It is not even a mechanism even using the definition you provided.Until you present a model that explains things better than the current models, you are simply talking nonsense.Edited by jar, : fix sub-title

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Anyone so limited that they can only spell a word one way is severely handicapped!

As I mentioned earlier, all any designer can do is try to understand how natural processes work and rearrange existing processes to achieve a desired result. We have no evidence that a designer can create new processes.You seem to be confirming that your god guards his recipe just like Coca-Cola jealously guards its recipe from Pepsi.

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Life is like a Hot Wheels car. Sometimes it goes behind the couch and you can't find it.

Hi Dr, I disagree with your assesment, as it is my mechanism (process) by which the Heaven and the Earth began to exist.What is your alternative process by which the Heaven and the Earth began to exist?All information I know of comes from the top down. Information is created in a mind. Then it is expressed through some media to a receiver.There are many laws in effect controling the universe. These laws have to have an origin and the only place that could be is in a mind.That is why I believe there has to be an intelligent designer that created this universe. Well this creationist has no such doctrine.If you will notice my posts I say that the universe either began to exist or has always existed in some form.I believe it has always existed in some form. I believe that the intelligent designer took existing energy and created the Heaven and the Earth from that existing energy.That would suffice the temperature 100 billion degrees K. Science reports existed at singularity. It would also suffice the statement that energy can not be created.Science has no such process though they are looking for one in string theory and a few others.That is the reason I make the statement:The universe began to exist. (Which would requiere it to begin to exist from non-existence).ORThe universe has always existed in some form. (That is what science is trying to prove but have a real problem with it).An intelligent designer solves all those problems. Everythig that exists whether you can see it or not. Actually both sides claim they know what happened. If you think not just read the Big Bang Thread. If the universe has not always existed in some form or was not created by an intelligent designer.How did it begin to exist and from what did it begin to exist. Son Goku and cavediver have assured me there was no thing before T=0. So if the laws were not created by an intelligent designer or by chaos, where did they come from.They did have to exist prior to the universe to be able to control the beginning of the universe and the process that is supposed to have taken place during the things covered by the BBT.If not intelligence,If not chaos,Then what nonsense do you propose?God Bless,

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"John 5:39 (KJS) Search the scriptures; for in them ye think ye have eternal life: and they are they which testify of me."

Hi Ringo, Information is not mechanical.Processes are mechanical.God Bless,

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"John 5:39 (KJS) Search the scriptures; for in them ye think ye have eternal life: and they are they which testify of me."

Hi crash, All I found at talk origins was a bunch of BS.I did find the random mutation generator avida 2.8.1 which is used or misused at the discrecion of the operator as there is a command line that parameters can be changed. So much for random if you can change the way the program runs. It does what you want it to do.

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"John 5:39 (KJS) Search the scriptures; for in them ye think ye have eternal life: and they are they which testify of me."