Re: Human design and natural "design"

dkomo <dkomo871@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote or quoted:
> Perplexed in Peoria wrote:
> > "dkomo" <dkomo871@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message news:ddiijq$2ok$1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

> Because nature can use massive parallism to explore an immense search
> space. It can literally "experiment" on tens of millions of species
> simultaneously. And it has tens of millions of years in which to do it.
> These significant advantages over what humans have to work with.
>
> But we can produce a complex design directly with very little trial and
> error. Given a design spec for a digital filter, for example, we merely
> feed the parameters into a computer, and presto voila there's the
> filter. Nature has absolutely no capability to do this.

Here you are using terminology which divorces man from nature.

I know there's a long tradition of that - going back to Darwin and
beyond. However I wish people would stop using such terminology.

One of the Darwinain revelations is that man is part of and a
product of nature - not something apart from or divorced from it.

> Actually, you could say nature did evolve the
> silcon chip indirectly by evolving man, but it took her 3.5 billion
> years starting with some basic biochemical ingredients.

That's more like it ;-)

> It could be said that nature is herself intelligent because is composed
> in part of billions, if not trillions, of intelligent organisms. [...]

A useful perpective. The evolutionary process has become intelligent.

No longer can it be argued that evolution can't perform fitness
evaluations under simulation - or that it lacks foresight, aims
and goals. Those things may have been missing back in the dark
ages, true - but these days the process includes intelligent agents
that have these attributes and abilities - and their actions can
influence the path evolution takes.
--
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