What we know of intelligent design (in lower case, not the origin myth with that name) is a bunch of stuff including various economies of design processes and elegance of design processes. Reuse and standardization of components and subsystems have to be among the top principles of design.
So at bare minimum, similarity between chimp and human (and bonobo and gorilla and pig and rat) genomes hardly rules out an intelligent design process, the reuse in fact would more reasonably be thought a hallmark of intelligent design process.
Which is not to say that I don't credit natural and sexual selection among mutations as the most probably correct theory as to how we came about. But the economy of effort that reuse provides, it provides to designers intelligent and unintelligent alike.
To reiterate, my point being this is not a point in favor of evolution over intelligent design.
Second: how is it meaningufl to invoke an omnipotent designer as a naked unsupported claim that while all the designers we know (unintelligent and finite intelligence) would follow these economies of design, an omnipotent one would not? Don't you need to flesh out your theory as to why an omnipotent designer would not reuse and design incrementally?
I'll help out by telling you why I think an omnipotent designer WOULD do reuse. When the omnipotent designer designs, blood, or bone, or ATP-ATG cycle or a neuron for a particular purpose, being unconstrained, presumably this designer goes for the true optimum given whatever constraints he has decided to put on himself in this design. When he then is designing a family of creatures, each creature that uses that subsystem will want that fully optimal version. So in this case, reuse occurs not because the designer has finite energy, but because the system being reused is the optimal design for that system.
So what is your theory of an omnipotent designer that RULES OUT an optimum designer using reuse, just like all the known designers (intelligent and unintelligent) already do?
The primary reason humans reuse previous inventions is that point of economy of effort. We have a limited amount of resources that we can invest in any one project. If we were capable of independently recalculating the optimum design for each project we work on, we would do better. In the worst case scenario, we find out that the same solution that applied to our last problem also solves the one we're currently working on. But fairly frequently, we would find that there are different optimum strategies for different problems, and in those cases, we would d...
Today's post, But There's Still A Chance, Right? was originally published on 06 January 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
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