This is an ironic weakness of evolutionary algorithms and the like. They could produce incredibly powerful artifacts but they'd be so complex we couldn't understand how they work.
This is an ironic weakness of evolutionary algorithms and the like. They could produce incredibly powerful artifacts but they'd be so complex we couldn't understand how they work.
The other irony is that scads of creationists would immediately take it as evidence of "design".
The interesting thing about evolutionary results (in the lab, and elsewhere) is that they often produce solutions which are "counterintuitive". Some researchers speculate is that the reason is that human designs are constrained to "humanlike" thinking processes, which often involve building devices out of modular components, which interact with the other components in straightforward, linear ways.
Evolution, on the other hand, is perfectly free (and in fact quite likely to) produce solutions which are wildly "messy" in the sense that every part may interact in multiple (and practically unpredictable) ways with countless other parts. In mathematical lingo, its solutions are apt to be chaotic and non-linear (which almost by definition *aren't* intuitively obvious to human understanding).
Consequently, evolutionary solutions often appear "alien" to us and hard to understand, and at least thus appear to be the result of some super-genius designer, when in fact they're just a result of brute-force trial-and-error, refined by mechanistic selection.
So perhaps the creationists might want to keep that in mind the next time they marvel over some "amazingly complex" or "intricate" biological process. The fact that we find something hard to understand doesn't necessarily mean it's brilliant -- it may just mean it's non-intuitive to us because it's not the way *we'd* think to put something together, but natural processes are under no obligation to produce things the "obvious" way.