[cap-talk] Off-topic: watchmaker argument

[Mike Samuel]

2009/2/3 David-Sarah Hopwood <david.hopwood at industrial-designers.co.uk>

> Mike Samuel wrote:
> > I came up with a critique of intelligent design recently by arguing that
> the
> > designer in the blind watchmaker analogy has to (1) work alone, or (2)
> > produce designs without any feedback or input from other designers.
>
> The watchmaker argument against evolution is flawed in many different ways.
> Here's a fun demonstration of one of them, showing that a functional watch
> *can* evolve:
>
> <http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=mcAq9bmCeR0>
>

I think this is a great way to clear up a lot of misconceptions about the
theory of evolution but it does nothing to attack ID as an alternative to
evolution.

The core claims of ID are that there is a non-empty set of existing
irreducibly complex artifacts and that these must have been designed and
that a design is evidence of a designer.

The clip you cited makes a compelling case that the irreducibly complex set
is smaller than one might believe, but it does not prove it's empty.  And I
don't think it's easy to prove that it is empty -- many directed search
algorithms have real trouble with local minima and so it is quite reasonable
to believe that an arrangment of local minima in a search space could make
it hard for a directed search algorithm to transition from one region in the
search space to another i.e., that there are many structures that are
vanishingly unlikely to be produced by evolution.  Proving that none of
those structures exist in nature is hard.

So instead I am arguing that ID fails as an alternative to evolution
regardless of whether the IRCS set is empty by attacking the "a design is
evidence of a designer" clause by showing that it can only be evidence of a
designer with attributes inconsistent with other assumptions of ID.



>
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> David-Sarah Hopwood ⚥
>
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