Delusion XIII - Design Defined

Design - To plan out in systematic, usually graphic form.

Before having children, I planned what they were going to look like. I chose a partner knowing what I wanted the children to be like. I had their early childhood education planned out quite in advance. Hey presto! I'm a genetic engineer!

That is what I think when people say "look at the wonderful things this or that person designed" Sure he designed a 747, but there was a very similar looking 707 mass-produced before it, and other planes before that. All the designer is doing is putting in a mutation to a design already available, testing it thoroughly (discarding failed species) over and over again (through multiple un-noticed generations) In fact, if there was a God, that is exactly the process of design one would expect. He couldn't have come up with a human without extensive experimentation with primates etc. etc. Evolution is *exactly* the analagous process of design to how humans come up with new designs in their sphere.

eg. Page 157 "2 The natural temptation is to attribute the appearance of design to actual design itself. In the case of a man-made artefact such as a watch, the designer really was an intelligent engineer.It is tempting to apply the same logic to an eye or a wing, a spider or a person."

This is a bad analogy - Sure, the engineer does have to be intelligent, but a fancy design of a watch has to be seen in the context of there existing an extensive watch industry. The first wristwatch was some clever engineer thinking of putting a strap onto a pocket watch. The first pocket watch was just a scaled down clock. The first clock was funny shaped stick placed in the sun etc. If you correctly transfer this analogy to the need for God to design a fancy wing, one must have it in the context of wing genes being spread through the population already. The clever designer saw something goodlooking in the flight of some cute bird :) and sought to kill off some of other lesser birds, and procreate that one.