[general_re]

But it is a teleological example - it is entirely goal-driven. If I sit down with a pile of parts and an instruction booklet, I know the final product is going to be a soapbox derby racer long before I so much as pick up a hammer. And Dawkins's Hamlet metaphor, while a good analogy about how information is transmitted in evolutionary systems, is not a perfect analogy for evolution for exactly the same reason - we know that the final product must be Hamlet. But we don't know that, and can't know that, about living things.

But what we can do for living organisms is to sit down and look to see what we can find out about those intermediate forms. Evolution is not goal-driven - "what good is an intermediate, less-than-fully-functional step"-type questions betray something of a misunderstanding of the process. The ultimate goal of hominid brain development was not big-brained creatures like us, just as the ultimate goal of small-dinosaur evolution was not birds, for one simple reason - there is no ultimate goal. None. What we are today is as much accident as anything else. Same for the birds. Same for everything else that lives, breathes, walks, swims, or crawls.

Even if Archaeopteryx couldn't fly as well as modern birds, or Australopithecus couldn't think as well as we can today, or whatever, they were still an improvement over what came before. And as a slight improvement, with a slight advantage, they survived when others did not. They didn't plan it that way - no one planned it that way. It only looks like that.

I can't stress that enough - there is no goal, no finished product where we can say "done." It just looks that way - where we are now, and what we are now, is pure happenstance. Had the dinosaurs not gone extinct, you and I might very well have been large-brained reptiles, having this same discussion, and trying to avoid falling into the trap of thinking normatively and teleologically, that how we were was somehow the natural order of things and the way things must be, that the world was designed for our sole pleasure. Re-run life's grand experiment again, and we might not even be vertebrates - we could have just as easily been large-brained worms, given the right set of conditions.

Any goal-driven analogy is necessarily imperfect - Dawkins's just as much so as anyone else's.

I hope you understand that I'm not doing this just to be difficult - while I can play devil's advocate as well as anyone, I hope to give as full of an explanation as I can of why I am skeptical of all of these analogies.

[maro]

All of that may be true...and nonetheless it would be utterly irrelevant. The analogies assume an actor and intentionality, but actors and intentionality are not critical to what the analogies are getting at. EVEN IF someone was deliberately trying to edit the ur-Hamlet into the final Hamlet by small changes, there is no plausible path through intermediates that are of the class "plays." EVEN IF someone was deliberately trying to modify DOS a line at a time or by bit flips, there is no plausible path through intermediates that are of the class "software programs." EVEN IF someone was deliberately trying to build a soapbox racer, there is no plausible path through intermediates that are of the class "self-propelled vehicles." Each of these tasks would be much harder if there was no actor but rather random changes. So, if the analogies show that piecemeal changes are utterly implausible assuming actors with intent, a fortiori the analogies show how ridiculous the claim would be assuming random changes. Your objections are a strawman.