[nkrisc]

The fascination with “intelligent design” is cherry-picking. The is no shortage of “unintelligent design” in the natural world.

Take humans, for example. You can block your trachea and die through the simple act of eating. An intelligent (and omniscient) designer could have avoided that by better designing our overall our overall structure.

Or take the fact or ear bones are modified jaw bones. Or if you believe in intelligent design, ask why our intelligent designer thought it wise to link our jaw to our ears so that it’s hard to hear things when you’re chewing.

[smusamashah]

When you notice these flaws you are seeing it in very very short term. What we are today is what eventually worked for a million years. The design you see today is the way it is because it had to be robust enough (including those problems) to survive to this day.

The examples you quote do look like a problem today, but I think they must have worked to some benefit to bring us here.

[wruza]

They must work just well enough. Nature doesn’t strive for an ideal, cause it has no ideas. It’s a semi-working minimum based on another semi-working minimum. A duplicated bone is just infinitely more likely than a completely new organ. And you don’t have to be free from cancer or arthritis or heart diseases if your population leaves just enough offspring in time.

Iow, it’s not only robust enough, but just robust enough and never pretended to be ideal or durable, except for few accidental cases like sharks, crocs and turtles. Who surely can suffer from long-term non-killing issues but cannot whine to their GP about it.

The examples you quote do look like a problem today, but I think they must have worked to some benefit to bring us here.

Nah, it’s a vast space. There may be natural trade-offs, but there’s no force to solve an issue in the best way possible. It solves randomly and if that creates a non-fatal problem - bad luck, now we just have it. You’ll always have a set of non-fatal problems just under fatality, and also a set of fatal problems just under a reproduction disabling line.

[cassepipe]

So evolution is a big pile of hacks ? :)

[wruza]

A concurrent optimization of stable reproduction (and nothing more) modulated by natural+emergent logistic maps.

Personally, and in hindsight ofc, I find abiogenesis much more miraculous than the life/evolution following it, cause the latter was sort of obvious and almost indestructible by its nature after it all started. It sort of just happens unamazingly in the complexity space it is lazily exploring (which itself is amazing that it exists).

Only intelligent agents can explore it with a goal different from (but still including) stable reproduction.

[beAbU]

Hacks imply some amount of intelligence, identifying a flaw or shortcoming, and trying some innovation to work around it.

[rakoo]

> I think they must have worked to some benefit to bring us here.

No, the other consequence of evolution is that whatever we are today is not enough to kill us. Some of the things in our bodies and behavior are just useless, but not bad enough that they endanger our life and cut the genetic deviation responsible for it, so it just keeps on being there.

There's no good reason we still have 5 fingers on feet, but they're also not bad enough that having them all would endanger us as as species, so they just stay there.

[bena]

This is kind of wrong-ish.

There are parts that might be a million years old, but everything is in a state of flux at all times. Things are changing all the time. Evolution is a process with no end goal.

And just because that got us here today doesn't mean it's the best design. If that's the case, cats are equally the best design. As are dogs, and elephants, and mosquitos, and platypuses. Evolution is the ultimate form of the adage, "You don't have to be faster than the bear, just faster than your friend". Good enough works well enough.

We are effectively held together with duct tape and string. Our eyes are wrong, our backs are wrong, our throats, nerves, circulatory, etc. are all wrong in some manner. And some of the fixes are simple. There is no reason for our ocular nerve to start from the inside of the eye. It just happened that way. And it worked well enough.

You can use a lead pipe to hammer nails, that didn't make it a good choice.

[nkrisc]

Yes, you’re describing evolution.

[smusamashah]

I am. I am also saying you can not design us any better than what we are today. You can't look into next billion years. Whatever becomes of us at the point will the best design at that point. The optimal design you are suggesting has zero guarantees to keep working.

If anything, your optimal design is just another mutation that may or may not survive time.

[lioeters]

> you can not design us any better

I disagree, evolution is not perfect nor intelligent (as far as we know). It's never the "best design" that survives, it's always "good enough for now", merely better than other solutions at the time. A billion years of good enough is not necessarily the best it can be theoretically.

I'm sure we can find examples of living processes that are dumb and inefficient, with obvious room for improvement, but have survived for millenia simply because it was good enough.

[latexr]

> I am also saying you can not design us any better than what we are today.

Of course you can. We could regenerate limbs like a lizard’s tail, keep growing teeth like a shark, not require so many different types of foods to survive healthily… The list goes on and on.

[wruza]

You absolutely can. Moreover, assuming enough technological and cultural evolution in e.g. 1000-10000 years, it will likely be done, if not completely replaced and redesigned.

The fact that conditions change doesn’t make your current form ideal.

Speaking of conditions.

In 5 billion years there will be no need for natural selection cause Earth will dip into the exploding Sun and evolution game will be over. Nothing will keep working. Even in 1B years it will be pretty hot outside. We’ll have no time for that “optimal” crap anymore, starting now tbh, considering our stupid tribal nature and the complexity of overcoming it.

Btw, if we fail to continue our current civilization, there will be no another civilization, cause we’ve drained all under-your-feet resources long ago. The next civilization will be forever farmers slowly burned by a star.

We absolutely can escape this fate by finding something much better than a bare minimum.

Edit: messed up numbers, fixed

[nkrisc]

You could if you were an intelligent designer designing humans completely from scratch a mere 10,000 years ago after you created the universe.

Which is the absurdity I’m pointing out.

[albedoa]

[flagged]

[9dev]

GP is arguing for something else though, namely that intelligent design is a fallacy. It’s advocacies argue that god created humans a mere 10k years or so ago, which obviously implies we didn’t evolve over millions of years, but were in fact created with inexplicable flaws. It’s all bullshit, of course, but there are people believing that.

[protonbob]

"It’s advocacies argue that god created humans a mere 10k years or so ago". This is false. There are plenty of ID advocates that believe in a scientific timeline, albeit, just with some intelligent guidance.

[nkrisc]

Which is conveniently unverifiable.

[fellowniusmonk]

And it would be a massively counter intuitive finding (if ID turned out to be anything but fantasy) because based on genetics and morphological lineage it looks exactly like a system/process that fits unguided evolution through selective pressure feedback loops.

[protonbob]

I'm just saying that your comment about 10k years is wrong and is not commonly held among intelligent design folks. I'm not arguing for that position though I do hold it.

[nkrisc]

Intelligent design is a code word for the creation myth of the Abrahamic religions in an attempt to make it seem like it has some basis in science.

Please point to a theory of intelligent design that is verifiable and doesn’t involve magic.

[dennis_jeeves2]

That is precisely the point he is trying to make....

[lpat]

That's pretty weak argument against intelligent design.

1. The designer does not have to be "omniscient" only intelligent. Some people believe in it's omniscience but I don't think it's a requirement.

2. How do you know that our trachea is not an optimal design when you take into account all the tradeoffs?

3. You're surrounded by items created by intelligent design (us) and all of them have flaws, reused parts and tend to break. Obviously you wouldn't argue based on this that they weren't designed by intelligent beings.

[nkrisc]

> How do you know that our trachea is not an optimal design when you take into account all the tradeoffs?

Because if we were designed from scratch we could have been designed in any optimal shape or form.

> You're surrounded by items created by intelligent design (us) and all of them have flaws, reused parts and tend to break. Obviously you wouldn't argue based on this that they weren't designed by intelligent beings.

Show me an intelligent designer who can literally design the universe, but is still not intelligent enough to avoid these flaws even we can recognize. I don’t think we are intelligent enough to design a completely novel life form, let alone as many as exist on earth in all their forms.

This is all beside the point that there’s no evidence of any kind for intelligent design, only supposition based on nothing more than intuition and feelings.

[lpat]

> Because if we were designed from scratch we could have been designed in any optimal shape or form

Only if you assume the designer had infinite time, knowledge and resources. But life on Earth did not have to be created by some omnipotent god who created universe. It only requires more advanced intelligence than us. Although theoretically even we may reach this level in the future with advances in bioengineering.

> This is all beside the point that there’s no evidence of any kind for intelligent design, only supposition based on nothing more than intuition and feelings.

Depending on what you consider "evidence" the same sentence could be said for evolution. There are many arguments in favor of intelligent design like for example no viable mechanism of randomly evolving genetic code. I wouldn't say it's as open and shut case as you make it seem.

[dfxm12]

Only if you assume the designer had infinite time, knowledge and resources. But life on Earth did not have to be created by some omnipotent god who created universe.

No need to be so coy. Who/what else do proponents of intelligent design believe designed us if not an omnipotent, omniscient, God? Ancient aliens? Deep Thought?

[nkrisc]

Intelligent design is a code word for the creation myth of the Abrahamic religions.

If there’s some other scientific theory of “intelligent design” you’re referring to, please enlighten me as I’m not aware of it.

> Depending on what you consider "evidence" the same sentence could be said for evolution.

There is empirical evidence for evolution.

[smusamashah]

Flaws is a wrong way to put these things you notice.

Would a perfectly and optimally designed being get no diseases? won't die? won't fall?

[fellowniusmonk]

I think a perfectly designed being would not require killing to live, would run on sunlight or other direct power sources and be steady state or mostly steady state.

If we ever make silicone man that runs on sunlight then I'll say, "ah, this looks like a being created by a moral intelligent designer".

It's going to be pretty revealing when a creature with such "lowborne morals" as ourselves creates a being that can function and operate without the explicit need to kill something every ~7 days to survive.

[mrguyorama]

I would argue human beings don't need to kill to live right this moment.

But yes, there are a million ways in which the human biology is imperfect.

If our bodies are temples, then whoever made us is probably Nurgle. Nothing else really explains the reproductive organs sharing space with the waste removal ports.

[ssener2001]

Where has our mind shown the capacity to be an engineer of the universe? With this limited intellect, we cannot encompass the beauty of the whole. Even if it were beneath a forearm-length nose, if only attention were paid to it, beauty could still be found!"

[hackeraccount]

My favorite version of this argument is from Catch-22.

It starts with a discussion about the miseries people suffer and if they have any utility at all. Is pain a useful warning of problems or could that information be gotten across in a better way?

It ends with the two characters agreeing that neither believes in God, with one not believing in a good and kind God and the other not believing in an evil malevolent God.

https://risingentropy.com/catch-22/

[delichon]

I consider myself an intelligent designer but have to make compromises in design all the time. The only kind of designers that don't are ones with cartoonish super powers like deities.

[nkrisc]

That’s the marketing trick behind “intelligent design”. Now it sounds so reasonable!

[erfgh]

Well I can crash my bicycle going downhill and neglecting to use the brakes, this doesn't mean it wasn't intelligently designed.

Design is all about tradeoffs.