Rather than start with the result and think backwards, it can make things clearer if you go back to a point in time and think forwards from there.
What I want to see is how the unique human capacities that make *us* designers can be produced by "natural" selection. Because there is such a quantum leap from the intelligence of lower animals to the amazing capacity of humans, we need compelling evidence of how the transition occured. I haven't seen that evidence yet.
Here is where you need to think a little. One must consider the environment that our ancestors were living in when human intelligence was beginning to evolve and place ourselves in it for a moment. It’s an unfriendly environment with predators, and competition for food. Compared to other creatures, early humans aren’t particularly strong or fast, which puts a great deal of pressure on their survival. So, they need another advantage to adapt. Luckily, they have their brain. The brains of some have grown in size and acquired a better awareness of their surroundings (picture the scene from 2001: A Space Odyssey, where the ape is playing around with a leg bone and realises that it can be an extension of his arm, allowing him to strike with much greater power). So there are these guys with slightly smarter brains using very basic tools and weapons, and those who aren’t so smart and still trying to hunt and fight with bare hands. Who is more likely to survive? And so, this goes on for some time, if you’re smarter you survive. They reproduce, the smartest offspring being those that survive, and so on.
Another important consideration is that groups have a better chance of survival than individuals, safety in numbers. They can cooperate better as a group if they have a means of communicating amongst themselves. Generally among early human groups communication is very basic, but with smarter brains, more sophisticated and effective communication is able to develop. Those that communicate better are the ones that survive.
That’s where it all starts. Because the human is not particularly well built for survival in the physical realm, we have always been very dependent on our brain, so the main selection pressure has been on its abilities. Therefore, natural selection has generally favoured the more intelligent brain, ending up at the point where we are at today.
You made this point in an earlier post:
That’s what natural selection is all about — survival of the species. You make the wrong choices and you die. You make the right choices and you survive. Humans, on the other hand, take a million creative actions that don’t depend on survival.
Today’s humans do, yes. In modern society we do not have the everyday survival struggle that our earliest ancestors did, however we still do retain the abilities of the brain that allowed them to survive. Lets look at the example of Shakespeare’s sonnets that you mentioned a while back. Going right to the core, I’d say they are basically a manifestation of the human ability of language and communication, which as I’ve already mentioned was important for survival. Just because we don’t need those creative actions for survival, doesn’t mean we stop using them.
So in summary, basically I'd say yes, natural selection can produce intelligent design (as practiced by humans). In fact, I find it hard to imagine it NOT being produced, based on the environment our ancestors were up against.
On the 7th day, God was arrested.
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