Indeed is there intelligent design? I sometimes wonder...
The creationists have a point. The things we have designed and the things "nature" has designed have a lot in common. Maybe the process is similar too.
Indeed, what we call design is an evolutionary process too. No watchmaker sat down and started to design the watch from scratch. The evolution of watches or any other artefact took place over many generations. And it was driven by opportunism. Digital watches came about because digital electronics was developed for other purposes and then it was realized that it was handy for watches too. Similar stories as for birds and feathers.
Also our designs are not as good as they could be. They are just as good as they have to be. You see this in software engineering. Often a mediocre solution is adopted due to the history of the design process. We cannot change it anymore because too much software would have to be rewritten, incompatible changes to interfaces would at least temporarily lead to a worse performance, more bugs etc. So we stick with the imperfect because perfection would be too expensive. Perfection cannot survive.
It is not only natural evolution which produces apparently stupid solutions to problems like this nerve Dawkins is using as an example for the fallacies of evolutionary design.
Hence, is there intelligent design? Or is this just an illusion, an idealisation of the actual process? Real design is always evolutionary with all its strange features.
The main difference between human design and biological design is the speed, it seems. Compare the time it took for any organ to evolve to the development of mobile phones. So having all these additional features of human intellect, reflection, communication, speeds up the process by several orders of magnitude. Wether it fundamental changes it, is a different question.
