Life looks intelligently designed because of its complexity and
arrangement. As a watch implies a watchmaker, so life requires a
designer.
Source:
Cicero, Marcus Tullius. 1896 (45 B.C.). De Natura Deorum (On the Nature
of the Gods), transl. Francis Brooks. London: Methuen; Book 2,
chap. 34.
http://oll.libertyfund.org/Texts/Cicero0070/NatureOfGods/HTMLs/0040_Pt03_Book2.html#hd_lf040.label.159 Paley, William, 1802. Natural Theology: or, Evidences of the
Existence
and Attributes of the Deity. London: J. Faulder.
Davis, Percival and Dean H. Kenyon, 1989. Of Pandas and People: The
Central Question of Biological Origins (2nd ed.). Dallas, TX: Haughton.
Response:
According to the definition of design, we must determine something
about the design process in order to infer design. We do this by
observing the design in process or by comparing with the results of
known designs. The only example of known intelligent design we have is
human design. Life does not look man-made.
Nobody argues that life is not complicated. However, complexity is not
the same as design. There are simple things that are designed and
complex things that originate naturally. Complexity does not imply
design; in fact, simplicity is a design goal in most designs.
In most cases, the inference of design is made because people cannot
envision an alternative. This is simply the argument from
incredulity. Historically, supernatural design has been attributed to
lots of things that we now know form naturally, such as lightning,
rainbows, and seasons.
Life as a whole looks very undesigned by human standards, for several
reasons:
In known design, innovations that occur in one product quickly get
incorporated into other, often very different, products. In
eukaryotic life, innovations generally stay confined in one lineage.
When the same sort of innovation occurs in different lineages (such
as webs of spiders, caterpillars, and web spinners), the details of
their implementation differ in the different lineages. When one
traces lineages, one sees a great difference between life and
design. (Eldredge has done this, comparing trilobites and cornets;
Walker 2003.)
In design, form typically follows function. Some creationists expect
this (Morris 1974). Yet life shows many examples of different forms
with the same function (e.g., different structures making up the
wings of birds, bats, insects, and pterodactyls; different organs for
making webs in spiders, caterpillars, and web spinners; and at least
eleven different types of insect ears), the same basic form with
different functions (e.g., the same pattern of bones in a human hand,
whale flipper, dog paw, and bat wing) and some structures and even
entire organisms without apparent function (e.g., some vestigial
organs, creatures living isolated in inaccessible caves and deep
underground).
As noted above, life is complex. Design aims for simplicity.
For almost all designed objects, the manufacture of the object is
separate from any function of the object itself. All living objects
reproduce themselves.
Life lacks plan. There are no specifications of living structures
and processes. Genes do not fully describe the phenotype of an
organism. Sometimes in the absence of genes, structure results
anyway. Organisms, unlike designed systems, are self-constructing in
an environmental context.
Life is wasteful. Most organisms do not reproduce, and most
fertilized zygotes die before growing much. A designed process would
be expected to minimize this waste.
Life includes many examples of systems that are jury-rigged out of
parts that were used for another purpose. These are what we would
expect from evolution, not from an intelligent designer. For
example:
Vertebrate eyes have a blind spot because the retinal nerves are in
front of the photoreceptors.
On orchids that provide a platform for pollinating insects to land
on, the stem of the flower has a half twist to move the platform to
the lower side of the flower.
Life is highly variable. In almost every species, there is a spread
of values for anything you care to measure. The "information" that
specifies life is of very low tolerance in engineering terms. There
are few standards.
Life is nasty. If life is designed, then death, disease, and
decay also must be designed since they are integral parts of life.
This is a standard problem of apologetics. Of course, many designed
things are also nasty (think of certain weapons), but if the designer
is supposed to have moral standards, then it is added support against
the design hypothesis.
The process of evolution can be considered a design process, and the
complexity and arrangement we see in life are much closer to what we
would expect from evolution than from known examples of intelligent
design. Indeed, engineers now use essentially the same processes as
evolution to find solutions to problems that would be intractably
complex otherwise.
Does evolution itself look designed? When you consider that some sort
of adaptive mechanism would be necessary on the changing earth if life
were to survive, then if life were designed, evolution or something
like it would have to be designed into it.
Claiming to be able to recognize design in life implies that nonlife
is different, that is, not designed. To claim that life is
recognizably designed is to claim that an intelligent designer did not
create the rest of the universe.
As it stands, the design claim makes no predictions, so it is
unscientific and useless. It has generated no research at all.
References:
Morris, Henry M. 1985. Scientific Creationism. Green Forest, AR: Master
Books, pg. 70.
Walker, Gabrielle, 2003. The collector. New Scientist
179(2405) (26 July): 38-41.