quote:
However, my main point here is to establish the criteria for the way IDC equates design with intelligence as a foundational assumption with no supporting evidence other than metaphors and analogies.
Mine too.
The thinking seems to go along the lines that if something is
designed it must have a designer (which seems reasonable), but then
leap to the assumption that a designer must be 'intelligent'.
The assumption makes 'intelligent design' a kind of tautology.
Several people here have pointed out that computer algorithms
that operate on the proposed evolutionary principle (heritable
variation + natural selection) can produce elecrical circuit
designs so novel that some companies have patented them ...
only to be confronted with the 'yes but an intelligence wrote
the program' and 'the output was predefined within the program'
arguments that computer models/simulations are always lamblasted
with.
For biological systems I can see indications of a lack of
intelligence in the designs, but nothing that jumps up and
says 'this is the product of an intelligence.'
I too, therefore, would like to hear the support for the claim
to 'intelligence' behind bio-designs.