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The programmer is inserting information (albeit in a diffuse and indirect way). Evolution is not supposed to have a goal, only differential survival.

These are good thoughts and need to be addressed.

To say that evolution has no goal or destination is not entirely true. Differential survival is not a trivial or random thing. It is an absolute judgement on "designs". If you introduce penicillin intro the environment of bacteria, it will produce a focused outcome, perhaps several solutions, but all meeting the selection criterion.

Genetic programming, as tortoise asserts, may not revolutionize computer design and programming, but it has proved that new and unexpected designs can emerge by "random" mutation guided only by the fitness function. That completely blows away a central tennant of ID, which states that such outcomes are forbidden by the laws of probability.

Does it prove biological evolution? Of course not. But it supports it.

Well, to the extent it truly models nature, it supports evolution. But GAs and GPs are simplified models of what some biologists suspect happens. They have to be simplified, else the problem would be intractable.

I'll agree that GA/GP can produce bizarre, unforseen, fascinating solutions. I started tinkering with them after Koza's first book came out (highly recommended). Again though, the imposition of a fitness function is a HUGE 'cheat' on the whole process. You don't have to take my word for it - I am merely Nukeman, semicompetent befuddled layman. Here is John Maynard Smith Evolutionary Genetics(1998)(page 307) "Perhaps it is the fact that the program has a representation of the optimum message and determines the 'fitness' of actual messages by comparing them to the optimum. No analogous process occurs during natural selection."

Programmers have simplified the process in other ways in order to solve the problem: selection pressure is high, and selection is immediate and certain. The programs can combine subtrees of instructions (if you are using a parse-tree representation a la Koza) without any restrictions. Pleiotropy and polygeny are usually missing. There are other simplifications. The circuit designers (or what-have-you) are usually trying to design a circuit, not solve our metaphysical curiosity.

The ID'ers would claim that the process is not at all like nature, and they score points with that assertion (at least with me). In the end I suspect that ID'ers and traditional biologists will simply argue endlessly over what the true probabilities are, what is a reasonable representation of nature and what is a cheat, etc. In short, nothing will change!

To say that evolution has no goal or destination is not entirely true.

Matter does not think. Random chance does not have a goal. You need goal to arrange things in an orderly manner instead of wandering blindly and hitting upon a solution by dumb luck. Evolution does not cut it. The complexity of living organisms shows it to be impossible. In fact, the attempt by evolutionists to claim that evolution is 'intelligent' shows how far their theory has lost respectability that it is forced to try to hijack the arguments of its opponents.