From: Joel Peter Anderson (joela@umn.edu)
Date: Thu May 08 2003 - 22:38:18 EDT
On Thu, 8 May 2003, Howard J. Van Till wrote:
> In response to the article on "Digital organisms" someone posted:
(me; at last I'm a "someone"!)
> > In other words, "a bunch of us deliberately set out to design a system in
> > which certain things would happen, when they happened, we announced that
> > our role in the process was unnecessary"
>
> I consider that to be an unfair caricature that misses the point of ID's
> Designer role.
Hm - I thought one of the more serious and valid criticisms was that the
"ID's Designer role" isn't well defined...
> Once again, it seems that the character of the ID thesis is lost in a sea of
> ambiguity.
Like I said...
> In this experiment, the equivalent of Intelligent Designer action posited by
> the ID movement would have been quite different:
How do you know this? ID isn't so precisely defined that you can say
that.
The experiment simulated what it set out to simulate - that computer
programs can be created that will evolve. This doesn't happen in the wild
though - you have to design an environment that will let it work. This
isn't news and this isn't surprising. What would be surprising is if the
programming environment itself had come into being by chance. It didn't.
> ID is not about the mental action of design, it is about non-natural,
> hand-like assembling action.
Again, you are pretty explicitly telling us what ID is - the books I have
on ID don't give me that kind of definition.
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