Biological design
I think this is similar to the cosmetic surgery debate. I say biological design is design. If God exists, he's a designer, and so are men who modify God's building blocks. Whether designing buildings or bodies, questions of aesthetic form and functionality arise.
I'm especially interested in the field of cyborgology which aims to improve the human body by combining organic and synthetic elements. An artificial heart is a current example. Why not one day wings and a body modified for flight?
evolution is not design
Aside from the complete idiocy of the 'intelligent design' debate (there actually is no debate, intelligent design is simply nonsense), evolution is utterly the opposite of design. There is absolutely no 'design' aspect to evolution. It's a marvelous mechanism, DNA, that makes natural selection, an engine driven largely by random mutation and breeding success, the stupendously successful system that created the seemingly astonishing diversity we see today.
We may be on the verge of learning if sentience is a characteristic that leads to long term breeding success. Clearly it's great in the short term but 100,000 years of rampant and questionable human breeding success is nothing more than the blink of an eye in geologic, galactic, universal, quantum time frames.
http://kayingleside.com
Disagree
I disagree completely - there is a very real and very rational debate about intelligent design. It's almost lunacy to assume that our entire existence is just one cosmic accident.
The much more plausible explanation is, of course, that the Flying Spaghetti Monster reached out with his many noodly appendages and created this world and all that is in it.
On a less serious note, I don't think evolution and design are so separate. Henry Petroski puts forth in his book 'The Evolution of Useful Things' that design evolves from perceived failures in existing objects, as well as the appropriation of objects designed for one purpose put into use for another purpose. Petroski's argument is logical and clear and is the same argument Darwin used against the theory of intelligent design: If something 'works' why would it need to be changed? Darwin's example is that certain physical attributes of some animals have gradually changed to suit different needs. If the Great Flying Spaghetti Monster is indeed perfect, why would he not create a unique physical attribute to suit that need to begin with?
So goes design: A chair works - why does it need to be changed? Perceived failures of the exact manner in which the chair works. Design 'corrects' those failures (and happily creates new failures which will need subsequent corrections).
Creation, on the other hand, implies a completely unique thing. Who here has ever witnessed the creation of something completely unique? A chair has always been a chair - even when it was a rock. A car has always been a car - even when it was a horse drawn chariot.
Don't be silly Brent
We're talking about design, not God.
DCWilson, you make my point. The main argument FOR intelligent design is that the world is SO terribly complex that it is impossible to have been an accident. It would be as if an unintiated person looked at an automobile and was told all of these parts came together by chance.
However, as DCWilson states - despite our belief in the Flying Spaghetti Monster - no inconclusive proof of his existence has yet been discovered... just some odd coincidences regarding the number of pirates in the world being a direct inverse to the temperature of the planet (google it).
So - intelligent design is just the opposite of regular design. If we apply ID to regD the theory would be thus: ALL chairs were created thousands of years ago by the Flying Spaghetti Monster. No chair has changed in those thousands of years because each chair is designed for a specific purpose - and the specificity of that purpose is so acute that it provides proof of the Flying Spaghetti Monster's existence.
But of course we know this is false. No-one knows who invented the FIRST chair - but we can all point to a series of structural, material, and proportional tweaks along the chair's history. An evolution born out of comfort, materiality, style, etc. Were there some intelligent designers in the midst? Theory has it there were - as evidenced by Mies, Wegner, Grcic.
Of course that is only a theory and one can just as easily point to La-z-boy, Bob's Discount Furniture, and Phillipe Starck as evidence that chair design is chaotic, random, and meaningless.
Intelligent design?
What lunatic designer would have have thought it remotely useful, prudent or logical to 'design' over 350,000 species of beetles? The mathematics of natural selection and the DNA mechanism is the only sensible explanation for the extraordinary diversity of life. If you simply calculate the mathematic probabilities engendered by DNA replication with the odd gamma ray mutation, plus a whole lot of time, the spectacular diversity of life on earth is not only unsurprising, it's absolutely inevitable.
http://kayingleside.com
Doesn't almost every religion claim...
...to be only right one? And some people do literally everything that their religion dictates, no matter is it rational or not.
I believe in God only if He contacts me directly. Seeing is believing.
I must protect my peace of mind.
http://richarddawkins.net
Science has not explained origins of the universe very well yet, but...
science's explanation of the origin of life on earth is quite satisfactory to persons who understand chemistry, atoms and molecules, and to me, who understands only a modest amount of chemestry, atoms and molecules.
Once upon a time, the elements of a molecule altered composition, as they apparently have done for as long as there have been atoms and molecules, and as they continue to do. One of those alterations lead to a molecule that could break apart and recombine. It might have happened to just one molecule, or there may have been considerable synchronicity operating among a great many similar molecules, because the environment of that moment probably reequilibrated, thus creating a rather large medium full of potential molecules to make this change. Either way, this recombinant molecule (or more probably molecules) varied into lots more recombinant molecules. These varied recombinant molecules varied into more and more complexity of composition. Eventually, the complexity of recombinant molecules becames as bewilderingly varied as what we see, in say crystalline forms, or sedimentary rocks, or any other substances that one can think of. But the difference was that these recombinant molecules didn't just occur and sit there in stasis. They kept breaking apart and recombining and with all of them recombining again and again, an enormously large number of opportunities (though not unlimited for life is quite limited in many ways...ask anyone over 80) occurred enabling further variation and complexity. And there was no need for an intelligent designer for this variation of recombinant molecules to occur, any more than there was a need for an intelligent designer for molecules that do not recombine, or for basic elements of the universe, etc.
Pt. 2
Variations, you see, like the prosaic metaphor of shit, happen...in physics and chemistry without super natural help--without a designer, unless you wish to think of the entirety of context, i.e., the universe, as the designer. Things organize, fit and disorganize in all contexts we know of, at all scales that we know of. And complexity emerges out of simplicity at all scales that we know of. And time, if it has any direction at all, moves only one way. One cannot go backward in time. And so what we see, or can otherwise measure empirically, is an inevitable accrual of complexity of things fitting into a complex of ever increasing complexity, which tends over time to lead to extremely complex organisms and organizations organisms to eventually having a great deal of difficulty adapting to changes of context and this is basically what triggers being selected out over time. A living thing accrues complexity to fit with context with out a means of reversing the complexity. The more complex its fit the more efficient it is in its context, but the more vulnerable it becomes to changes in that context.
One other basic principle to keep in mind which moves in only one direction is the conversion of mass to energy; what Einstein formalized in his pithy, easy to remember formula: e=mc^2. Everyone and everything that converts some of their matter to energy just gets to do it once with that particular bit of matter. You can't turn a critical mass of plutonium that has gone through fission back into a critical mass of plutonium no matter how hard and cleverly you try. Likewise, you can't turn a peanut butter sandwich that has been digested back into a peanut butter sandwich either. Mass converted to energy never gets converted back into the same mass. This is why the transporter in Star Trek can never happen as envisioned. We probably will one day learn upload and down load the full data simulation of a human mind, so that it can be transported across great distances, then downloaded into, say, a cybernetic organism elsewhere in the universe--a Hertz rental body if you will, have experiences, and upload the modified data simulation of the human mind, shipped back across great distances, and download it back into one's brain on earth. But, no, Mabel, we are almost certainly not going to be able to turn future Captain Kirks into light the color of TV turned to a dead channel, to borrow a William Gibson metaphor, and then back into the same Captain Kirks. I mention this one-way street of mass to energy for one reason: I do not think an intelligent designer would design the mass-energy relationship in a one way street, were he/she to have a choice in the matter. Mass and energy would be a lot handier if they could be converted back and forth and back again, whenever a thing desired to do so.
Pt. 3
Note: To those die hard optimists hoping for the Full Monty of transporters, the best I can give you is this: since at the limits of infinity, almost anything is conceivably possible, a Full Monty Star Trek transporter might happen. But the universe will have to change quite a good deal,essentially more than it has since it began, and it will have to become something none of us can likely inhabit, because we are all evolved for a universe with one-way streets for time and mass-energy conversion.
Space, at all scales, remains the final frontier. But information is very likely to be our E-ticket to get to ride to the remotest realms of it. Whether or not there is an intelligent designer, at any scale, I sure hope we are permitted sufficient time and sufficient generations of our recombinant molecules to explore the farthest reaches of space.
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