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>> No sane Designer would have designed it this way.
>
> Other than your belief that you would have done things differently, what
> is the basis for this claim?
OK, well sanity is something that medical professionals cannot strictly
define, even for human subjects. So let's leave that out.
What I can say is this: If we had some idea *why* the designer designed
life, we might be in a position to debate whether the way life works
matches this goal or not.
ID helpfully omits to specify what the motivation was. With no design
goal, we can't say a lot. Similarly, ID helpfully omits to specify
anything about the designer (or designers) at all, so we have nothing to
go on.
What we /can/ say is that no /human/ designer would have designed life
this way. But that's probably obvious from the fact that humans have
never designed anything even approaching the complexity of life. But,
more particularly, artefacts designed by humans exhibit certain specific
qualities.
Most obviously, man-made devices are highly discrete in their design.
The task to be performed is split up into separate subtasks, which are
performed by lots of little independent, orthogonal units, even if
that's a less efficient way of doing things.
Compare the computer and the human brain. (No, the don't do the same
thing. The resemblance is vague at best. But, very loosely, you could
claim that both are giant signal processors, essentially.)
A computer has a CPU, connected by a narrow bridge to a completely
separate RAM. It has several I/O devices, sometimes with their own CPUs
and RAMs, needlessly duplicating functionality already present. In
short, it is a collection of complex systems connected by simple
interfaces. (Here "complex" and "simple" are obviously relative terms.)
Now consider the human brain. Rather than having one lump of tissue that
receives sensory inputs, and a separate lump that stores memories, and a
separate bit that compares one to the other, and another bit that
generates motor outputs, what you /actually/ find is that all these
circuits are all tangled up together. There are no "memory neurons" and
"comparison neurons". Rather, the brain's ability to compare things or
to remember things is an emergent property of a large network of more or
less identical neural components, wired up in different combinations.
A human designer would have built a brain with lots of separate
compartments. Evolution has built one with lots of related and some
unrelated functions all tangled up together.
So, we can conclusively say that a human wouldn't have designed this
organ this way. If we actually knew something about the hypothetical
designer of ID, we might be able to test that claim as well. (But,
helpfully, we cannot.)
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