And that’s why I put it in quotes.
Welcome to the Straight Dope Message Boards, Fabulous Creature, we’re glad to have you with us.
You posted this in the forum called “Cafe Society” which is devoted to arts and entertainment. As you note, there are several places it could go, but I think this belongs more in the “Great Debate” forum, where there have been other similar threads. No biggie, lots of new folks get confused, easy to do.
I am surprised nobody has yet mentioned Phil Collins’ hair. Anyway, if ID were true, I would not register this surprise.
ID only makes sense if the designer remains a hidden mystery, with no accountability for his actions. If proponents of ID can always fall back on the “we don’t know the will of God”, we might as well shutter the schools now, because every question can be squelched with that canard. What is the purpose of seeking knowledge, if you believe the universe is unknowable?
That would make flying in an airplane rather painful, don’t you think?
Obviously, you’ve never worked as a Software Developer 
So are you blaming the designer’s mistakes on the user requirement gathering, or a poorly implemented waterfall design?
I imagine a number of folks would want to find out who the “Intelligent Designer” was so they can file some grievances to the source. 
Sort of a hijack from the main purpose of this thread, but this one is a subject for Great Debates in itself. It would fundamentally change the nature of human life and human behavior, and not necessarily for the better (depending of course on the goals of the Designer).
Not really intelligent design but something you might want to think about. In a world where centaurs and harpies exist wouldn’t there be other six limbed mammals as well? Cats with wings? Apetaurs?
“If G_d lived on Earth, people would break His windows.” - Yiddish proverb
I see what I believe is a mistake when people think of the term “intelligent” from “intelligent design.”
The problem is as follows:
“Intelligent” implies that the actions/decisions made were not only intended to reach a particular goal, but do indeed succeed to some degree.
If a goal was to “minimize the number of orifices required for the functions of eating and breathing”, then it’s perfectly reasonable to end up with 1 mouth.
If a goal was to “prevent choking on food at all costs”, then we would probably have 2 separate orifices, one for breathing and one for eating.
Obviously any one of us can think of an umlimited number of permutations for rearranging the structure of life on the planet to support various goals.
Because we don’t have any clue whatsoever as to the “designers” goals, it is simply not possible to argue whether the resulting designs are “intelligent” or not.
It’s entirely possible our “designer” received an A+ in Life Design 101,
and it’s equally possible our “designer” received an F- in Life Design 101 and was subsequently told to explore other “opportunities” at the institution.
My conclusion is that the word “intelligent” in “intelligent design” is beyond meaningless, it should be dropped.
Which means we are left with an idea that should be called “design.”
How does all this relate to this particular thread?
Answer:
I believe it is impossible to even speculate what a world would look like if ID is true because we simply don’t know what the goals are in the first place.
Hey Fabulous Creature. Sorry for this slight hijack, but your novel sounds kind of like Piers Anthony’s “Apprentice Adept” series (I think that is the name of it). Just thought I would alert you to it.
ID as defined by ID “theorists” doesn’t speak to the “master plan”, but intent with a little “i” is pretty much built in. Why would the designer engineer the bacterial flagellum unless he/she/it intended to make bacteria motile? The evidence of intent behind the invention is the purported “irreducible complexity” of the invention. So you could say ID claims we can at least know some part of the creator’s plan: “I want bacteria to move around on their own.”
Now, irreducible complexity has been satisfactorily debunked in every instance of its application that I am aware of. Some contributing to this thread seem to feel there’s another kind of ID, though, which is indistinguishable from motiveless natural forces. This, IMO, is just defining a god of a peculiar gap, being the God of the Unforbidden. If it’s impossible to rule God in, it’s equally impossible to rule God out. So stick Him in there wherever He fits and doesn’t cause trouble. The world looks like…
Evolution+God = Life as we know it.
which cannot be distinguished from…
Evolution = Life as we know it.
…according to this other definition.
Well, that’s fine, but God is an extravagance in such a scheme. Sure, nothing rules out an extravagance, but I think most proponents of ID feel God is actually manifest, vitally important, and completely necessary, not something you can tack on if you feel like it, with no discernable impact on the result.
Thanks, Dex, both for the welcome and the move. I started to put this in great debates in the first place, :smack: but I was concerned that my remark about this being for a story in progress might bump the subject into the Arts/Entertainment section. Next time I’ll go with my first impulse.
What’s an apetaur?
I’ve dedicated an embarrasing amount of thought to how this will all work out. F’instance, there are twenty-four ilks (species) of Fabulous Creature (i.e., sentient beings) in the Fabulous Plane, divided into two orders and seven classes. I’ve written about a hundred pages of speculation on the culture, homeland, politics, unique abilities, and so forth of each ilk.
There are other six-limbed lifeforms there. Terms like “mammal” and “reptile” aren’t useful in this context, though, because the Creatures are all more alike one another than any of them are to the unthinking animals. That is, the equiraptors (flying horses), which are NOT rational beings, only resemble the Centaurs and Unicorns on a gross level; on a cellular level, all three are quite distinct. (I guess that’s one way I’ve answered my own OP; in this intelligently designed world, there are definite barriers between different species that don’t exist in our evolved world.)
And now I’ll go back to reading replies.
I thought about replying that I devoured the Apprentice Adept series in high school and own all six (seven?) of them, but I’m not sure I care to admit that yet.
Nope, not gonna admit it. Too embarrassing. :o Why, if I told you that, someone might infer that I also purchased–in HARDBACK–the Incarnations of Immortality series.
My influences are…um…Madeleine L’engle. Yeah. Maddie. And Terri Windling. And Professor Lewis, of course.
But Anthony? Please! I was sixteen and simply cannot be held responsible for my taste.
As long as your world has genetical information encoded in DNA, or a similar mechanism, which allows biological traits to be passed on from parent to child, evolution will take place. The only other requirement is natural selection, and that’s pretty much a tautology (fitter genes lead to more descendants because that is the definition of “fitter”).
And if such evolution goes on for long enough, especially in organisms which share a common ancestor but which have ended up in different environmental circumstances due to geographical differences or whatever, it is pretty much inevitable that species will divide into new, separate species over time.
Hence, in your fictional world in which evolution does not happen, I would expect genetic inheritance to not exist either. Blond-haired people don’t get blond-haired children more often than redheads do, breeding a male and female racehorse could easily lead to a slow, sturdy plough horse, etc.
Also, I would expect the lines between species to be much more clearly drawn than they are in our world. So either the offspring of two poodles may result in a bulldog or a golden retriever without anybody batting an eye, or the different races of dogs are all different species (as you’d expect based on their visual differences) and cannot interbreed. Ligers, mules etc would not exist.
Same with people, of course: either race really does not exist and it would be perfectly normal for a black+asian couple to have a caucasian child, or humanity consists of several different species which are no more able to interbreed than a cat can produce offspring with a goldfish. Interesting story possibilities either way.
Whoops, I just realized I forgot the third requirement for Darwinian evolution: mutations. You could have a world in which gene inheritance did exist, but was completely predictable and deterministic and much more limited than our DNA-based genetics. So you could have some “micro-evolution” within a single species, but it would not be possible to achieve radical changes in genotype no matter how much time it may take. Just a bit of shuffling around of existing traits in different combinations.
However, a world with no genetic inheritance at all would make perfect sense in combination with ID, and I think it would give you a lot more interesting possibilities for your story.
To give just one example: if there is no evolutionary benefit to choosing a sex partner with good genes, would the concept of attractiveness even exist? After all, it’s pretty well established that most of the things that make a woman attractive to a man and vice versa can be traced back to what those traits say about their genetic fitness. But in your world, there would be no biological reason for a woman to prefer a strong, symmetrical looking man over a weak runt. She’d have the same chance at having fit, healthy children with either partner. So maybe we’d have a society in which people selected their partners exclusively on the basis of intellectual compatibility?
Signing off now, I trust you guys will have mercilessly pointed out all the holes in my logic by the time I wake up again…
Well, that’s ok then. Just don’t let us catch you with any of those Xanth novels!
I can say in complete and utter honesty that I have never read any work of fiction with the word “Xanth” in the title.
Sadly the same is not true of “Mode.” Or “Firefly.”
What the hell was I thinking?