This is only to be expected from evolution
Or from intelligent design. It's a wash if that's what you want to argue.
True enough. However, there are lots of patterns that evolution would not explain or allow for. Intelligent design can be made to account for anything at all. As a result, it's not a scientific theory.
Probability theory and information theory are unscientific? Have you read The Design Inference: Elimenating Chance Through Small Probabilities? If not, you should do so before saying what can and cannot be accounted for by these disciplines.
BINGO! I knew someone would use the "could've just as well have been designed" gambit, but tallhappy did it right in post #2!This is only to be expected from evolutionOr from intelligent design. It's a wash if that's what you want to argue.
True enough. However, there are lots of patterns that evolution would not explain or allow for. Intelligent design can be made to account for anything at all. As a result, it's not a scientific theory.
Every observation is consistent with "could have been designed". The question is, what pattern would an ID'er expect to see? And don't tell me "irreducible complexity", because plenty of creationists here insist that the best designers adapt their existing code to new projects.
The best human designers reuse & adapt our existing code, yes; but that's precisely because our memories & our understanding of all possible algorithms & design patterns aren't perfect. Mindless evolution has only the memory of the most recent previous design, so adaptation is the only design "strategy" open to it.
OTOH, a perfect designer would have to spend an infinitesimal amount more of effort on a brand new design than He would on a purely incremental design. This is why ID will always be helpless to predict a pattern. The perfect designer's choices would be purely aesthetic - an inscrutable whim. Yet ID could make a prediction assuming their designer is imperfect - but they'd never do that because an imperfect designer would never be worthy of being the unchallengable Authority Figure they're looking for who can save society from the awful consequences of (horrors!) "philosophical materialism".