Intelligent Design

[Dr.Love]

@Voyager

My interpretation is not that the design of the body is so trivial that an undergrad could do it, but that an undergrad with the tools to design a body wouldn’t make the boneheaded mistakes God supposedly made.

<snip>

algorithmic methods aren’t perfect, but they’re wrong in a very different way.

Sure, they won’t “make the boneheaded mistakes God supposedly made,” but they’ll make boneheaded mistakes all their own, that will become painfully obvious once there make billions of them over a span of many thousands of years.

@Hentor the Barbarian

I’m not sure I see, however, a response to my point here. If there was a limited, imperfect designer, it is still clear that he or she or it developed better technologies in nature around us. So they could have given humans (and all creatures, really) some much better ways of doing many things, but they still stuck us with the suboptimal design.

When stated like this, I don’t think I have any objections.

I’m not following. You seem to posit a “design” to present challenges. Do you mean a purposeful intelligent design, or are you using the term design to mean “the way that we are”?

I use design to describe something that exists to fulfill a purpose, though without necessarily having had an intelligent designer. Adaptations in nature propigate themselves because they provide useful services in helping the organism to survive and reproduce.

Finally, how does the suboptimal design argument misrepresent anything as child’s play?

My objection is to what I saw as overly harsh statements of the suboptimality argument. Given some of the responces that I’ve received, it seems that I may have misinterpreted the original post.

@Mangetout

Would you say that this can be adequately addressed by finding two extant examples of solutions to the same problem - one that is more efficient or less poorly-designed than the other?

I’m not entirely sure where you might take the argument, but I don’t see anything that I would object to.

@Cervaise

Clearer?

Much.

[Little_Nemo]

Speaking to this “b_wad” character in this thread is worthless. People like him/her, who have never read a scientific book in their life and come to argue a point they literally know nothing about and start a pointless debate to which anyone with half-a-brain already knows the facts about is so utterly pointless. Like clockwork, they post a few more messages and are never heard of again once their arguments are crushed into oblivion. Repeat ad nauseam.

I figure it’s like debates about the Kennedy assassination. You’ll never convince the true believers who usually are the ones who start the threads. But you might get some reality across to other people who are reading the thread. So it’s worthwhile not to let arguments based on weak evidence and poor logic go unanswered.