The analogy of plagiarism fails to illustrate what is intended. This gets a little stupid, doesn't it? Evolution predicts the indefinite continuation of neutral, irrlevant, vestigial features in the absence of pressures (such as exist in some bacteria) for efficiency and clean code. "Common design" has to shrug and say "You don't know the designer's ultimate purpose."
Rather, it provides an illustration of the opposite of what the author intended.
This is you distracting yourself, grasping at straws, simply refusing in your religious horror to go where the evidence points. Design is not a tight hypothesis and refuses to explain what we see. It merely reserves that a Designer could have left the mess we see for reasons of His own.
Let's look at where the analogy fails.
This is really time-wasting, irrelevant BS. If you don't want your nose rubbed in the inadequacies of design as supposed science, spare yourself.
One, books are intelligently designed, even if plagiarism occurs.
The analogy offered was not "Books just grow. Books have information. Therefore, since organisms have information, organisms must just grow." This is the strawman argument you are rebutting. This is cretin science.
Two, books are not self-replicating, so plagiarism requires direct intervention by an intelligent designer.
Same argument as their being "intelligently designed." You are missing a demonstration that the property of being self-replicating in itself implies design.
Three, plagiarism in the example cited was proved by duplicated errors of an EXISTING original, something evolution does not have.
Irrelevant except where wrong. We don't always have the original text of a literary work, either. We routinely make deductions and attempted reconstructions of originals by comparing later editions, rejecting outliers but making allowance when some are obvious copies directly from others, etc.
Four, duplicated errors exist even when plagiarism does not occur.
Common descent is not really plagiarism, but it duplicates "errors," inefficiencies, irrelevancies, vestigies, etc.
That is, future editions continue to reproduce previous errors until they are corrected.
You got it. Unless and until there are selection pressures for efficiency, the code can get junky.
Five, the article admits that some publishers intentionally insert "errors" in order to provide a layer of protection against plagiarism. And so the "errors" would not be errors, technically speaking.
Now there's a theory. Please explain who God was afraid of and how filling our genomes with viral DNA scars protects him.
In this final case, the "errors" serve as a kind of hidden autograph that proves their ownership. (Surely you can see my point on this one. The copyright owner leaves a mark to prove ownership.)
So God is a virus?
Sorry, I don't mean to play Twist and Shout. That's a very creationist style of argument. You didn't start out doing that, but you're in denial now, looking for ways not to face things, and the door marked "JUST DON'T UNDERSTAND" beckons, doesn't it?
" Now there's a theory. Please explain who God was afraid of and how filling our genomes with viral DNA scars protects him."
Your point makes me think of the sci-fi movie "Blade Runner". Remember how the replicants in the story had been designed to expire after a short lifespan (of about three years I think)?
What should God do to reveal Himself? And how should He have made things? Would it be necessary for Him to write "God was here" in some plain way on the DNA sequence? And should He have designed us to live forever without sickness or injury? (Maybe He actually did.)
Let me repeat my assertion on this issue. I do not deny the existence of these errors in nature. But I do not see any flaw in my earlier explanation of them:
There is no aberration or inefficiency in nature that cannot be explained by three factors. One, neither the environment nor life today is the same as it was long ago. (Evolution agrees.) Two, intelligent design does not negate possible intelligent intervention that may have resulted in less than optimum conditions in the environment and less than optimum performance of living things. (This is indeed what Biblical creationism has ALWAYS held. This is not an attempt to adapt creationism to fit modern science.) Three, by way of simple analogy, computer programs are simpler but similar to living things. All computer programs exist as a direct or indirect result of "intelligent design" (of the programmer). Most programs by the same programmer use code libraries to make the process of design more efficient. This results in unnecessary, redundant and inefficient (technically) code in subsequent programs. This concept of programming design is called "re-usability". This analogy fits perfectly within the scientific findings of biology.
"This is you distracting yourself, grasping at straws, simply refusing in your religious horror to go where the evidence points. Design is not a tight hypothesis and refuses to explain what we see. It merely reserves that a Designer could have left the mess we see for reasons of His own."
Biblical literalism is not science. It is faith. So I don't think we disagree on that per se. But that does not make it unscientific.
The thing is, these issues are thoroughly addressed in the Bible which existed long before modern evolutionary theory. These are not new questions that somehow were introduced as the result of evolutionary theory: "Why is there evil and injustice? Why is there sickness and death?"
"You are missing a demonstration that the property of being self-replicating in itself implies design."
I am not sure if you are challenging the idea that living things are self-replicating, or if you are just making a point for me that I failed to make. Yes. I think life is self-replicating, and that DOES indicate intelligent design.
We have not even explored how the environment in which life thrived MUST have been designed to foster it. But I don't foresee either of us changing our respective positions by exploring this.
We can both just keep thinking our own view is more correct. It will not hurt my feelings that you think I am unscientific. We just disagree. That's part of life.