Tuesday, December 30, 2008

Getting The Analogies Correct

Uncommon Descent:

ID and the Trajectory of Observational Resolution
GilDodgen

If I may be so bold, I would like to excise a commenter’s comment from Denyse’s thread, The canals that just had to exist on Mars, and redirect to what I consider to be the greatest weakness of Darwinian orthodoxy, and that is the trajectory of the evidence, which is almost never addressed by anti-ID advocates.

Regarding the notion that “canals” were early indicators of design on Mars, commenter leenibus submitted:

E.M. Antoniadi, with the aid of improved technology, realized that the appearance of design was false - the “canals” were fuzzy shapes and thus natural features. Unfortunately, while it may be a good example of mindset biasing views, it is hardly a ringing endorsement for those wishing to see Intelligent Design in nature!

The problem is that the exact opposite is the case concerning biological systems. With the aid of improved technology, the formerly fuzzy “canals” of biology (Darwin’s blobs of gelatinous combinations of carbon) are not becoming fuzzier and more easily explained by non-ID theses — they are now known to be high-tech information processing systems, with superbly functionally integrated machinery, error-correction-and-repair systems, and much more that surpasses the most sophisticated efforts of the best human mathematicians, mechanical, electrical, chemical, and software engineers.

To put commenter leenibus’s comment in proper perspective regarding the trajectory of observational evidence concerning the canals on Mars, I would like to submit the following:

The proper analogy would be that with increasing telescope power and other sophisticated analytical capabilities, we could observe that the canals on Mars were supported by suspension bridges, that the water was redirected to hydroelectric plants equipped with generators, that there was a power grid that distributed the power all over the planet, and that there were sophisticated software programs that controlled the distribution of the electrical power and synchronized it all.

This is what we observe in living systems, only raised to the Nth power — and N is very large.

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