Why would a designer design these?

[QED]

I am assuming that we are all familiar with the strange creatures that left their fossil remains in the Burgess shale - Critters like Wiwaxia, Marrella, Anomalocaris, and my own personal favorite - Hallucigenia:



Now standing aside from any dispute about the actual age of these fossils, is there any disagreement that these peculiar critters are representative of some of the earliest of species? I'm sure I would remember if I had seen one recently.

I ask because what is evident in these creatures is a far greater diversity of bodyplan compared to those seen today. Indeed just about every living creature alive today is topologically equivalent, being a tube with a single mouth-gut-anus arrangement. But these early fossils display significant deviations from this arrangement.

I would note that the situation is strikingly familiar to enthusiasts of vintage man-made artifacts of all types: I am thinking of the first aeroplanes with different numbers of wings and motor cars with seating arrangements no longer seen - not to mention radios, TVs, vacuum cleaners etc!

This is because the most efficient solution to our requirement always takes time to emerge due to our limited capacities. We tend to learn as we go along. However, given a specific objective (such as speed, passenger capacity etc.) there is generally an optimum solution waiting to be arrived at. This leads to uniformity - a convergence of style - no jet planes with six wings for example.

Now I am contemplating the same thing amongst the fauna of the Burgess shale. Creatures with multiple mouths, tandem guts and so on. Why would an intelligent designer seem to be following the same path as us?

[Jose]

Why would an intelligent designer seem to be following the same path as us?

Quite obviously because he is intelligent. Intelligence = capacity to learn. Not being able to learn, even if all possibilities are known, is no more than read-only-memory. ROM doesn't require intelligence, just data storage and access. Therefore, truly intelligent design requires designing things, then learning from their inefficiencies, and designing better things.

[Lotan]

Quite obviously because he is intelligent. Intelligence = capacity to learn.

Except that in this case learning means trial and error, which means error, which means that the designer isn't omni-perfect, especially if he already knows how everything is supposed to turn out anyway.

[Jose]

Quite obviously because he is intelligent. Intelligence = capacity to learn.

Except that in this case learning means trial and error, which means error, which means that the designer isn't omni-perfect, especially if he already knows how everything is supposed to turn out anyway.

Who says the designer has to be omni-perfect? We're just asking about intelligence. Intelligence doesn't have anything to do with hard-wired information that was put into a system before it was activated. It has to do with processing information and acting upon inputs in the most efficient way.

I wouldn't be so quick to say that Hallucigenia was trial and error. Hallucigenia may have been the ideal design for the conditions that existed at that time. It just turned out not to be most efficient for conditions that occurred later.

But I'm puzzled...if the designer knows how everything is going to turn out anyway, why bother with this charade of designing all these different things, and then wiping some of them out and modifying others? What's the point? We're pretty sure there will be some kind of future after we are gone. Why doesn't the designer just go straight for the endpoint, the "way that everything turns out"? Are we just playthings?

[hannahjoy]

Intelligence = capacity to learn.

That's not the only definition of intelligence, if you look here, and that's not the definition meant in the term "Intelligent Design".

[QED]

So we have an intelligent designer who is learning 'on the job'? This strikes me as being a significant departure from the usual story.

I wouldn't be so quick to say that Hallucigenia was trial and error. Hallucigenia may have been the ideal design for the conditions that existed at that time. It just turned out not to be most efficient for conditions that occurred later.

Indeed, for it to have survived in the fossil record indicates that it was a highly viable form at the time. But so were all its known contemporaries equally viable. A very compelling reason for this might be that competition was not as keen as it is now - these organisms were breaking out into virgin territory (the oceans of the young earth) and were only just starting to do battle for resources.

It is the pressure of competition in an ever more crowded arena which sets more stringent objectives for any given design. Does this not paint an interesting picture of evolution in operation? A designer would have to be tracking the process every step of the way 'tweaking' the designs to account for more focussed objectives. The parallel with man-made engineering is quite striking.

But I'm puzzled...if the designer knows how everything is going to turn out anyway, why bother with this charade of designing all these different things, and then wiping some of them out and modifying others? What's the point? We're pretty sure there will be some kind of future after we are gone. Why doesn't the designer just go straight for the endpoint, the "way that everything turns out"? Are we just playthings?

There is no shortage of such apparent riddles if you accept the theory of a supreme being running the show

[Jose]

Intelligence = capacity to learn.

That's not the only definition of intelligence, if you look here, and that's not the definition meant in the term "Intelligent Design".

Indeed, it is not the definition meant in the term "Intelligent Design." But, you know, the creationists mislead everyone when they say "evolution is just a theory"--so isn't it fair game to use a different definition to poke fun at ID?

Even in your link, we find these definitions for intelligence:

• The capacity to acquire and apply knowledge
• The capacity to acquire and apply knowledge, especially toward a purposeful goal.
• the ability to learn or understand or to deal with new or trying situations
• the ability to comprehend; to understand and profit from experience

These are definition #1 from each source listed--and every one of them refers to acquiring knowledge, or "learning." So, an "intelligent" designer would have to be able to learn, no? Someone who already knows everything can't learn, and can't be called "intelligent.";)) "All-knowing" would be OK, though.

Indeed, for it to have survived in the fossil record indicates that it was a highly viable form at the time. But so were all its known contemporaries equally viable. A very compelling reason for this might be that competition was not as keen as it is now - these organisms were breaking out into virgin territory (the oceans of the young earth) and were only just starting to do battle for resources.

Yes, of course! This fits with the Cambrian "Explosion." It wasn't until the battle got really fierce that there was strong selection pressure for hard parts like shells. Do we have any guesses about how squishy Hallucigenia might have been? I've sort of pictured it being covered with chitin, kinda like an insect exoskeleton (which might make sense, since yeast also make chitin around the neck of the bud, suggesting the possibility that chitin synthesis arose early).

It is the pressure of competition in an ever more crowded arena which sets more stringent objectives for any given design. Does this not paint an interesting picture of evolution in operation? A designer would have to be tracking the process every step of the way 'tweaking' the designs to account for more focussed objectives. The parallel with man-made engineering is quite striking.

It makes perfect sense for evolution. It also fits well enough with Theistic Evolution, in which god either pushed the "start" button, then sat back and watched, or paid close attention all along, and directed the specific mutations.

[Curious]

This is an interesting thread with some good points but why are so many animals descended from 5 digit ancestors when previously many animals had considerably more? This does not seem like intelligent design to me but trial and error and survival of the fittest. If design was so intelligent and the earth(as most creationists believe) is only 6000 years old then the rate of extinction could only be attributed to the designer being totally incompetent.

[Jose]

This is an interesting thread with some good points but why are so many animals descended from 5 digit ancestors when previously many animals had considerably more? This does not seem like intelligent design to me but trial and error and survival of the fittest. If design was so intelligent and the earth(as most creationists believe) is only 6000 years old then the rate of extinction could only be attributed to the designer being totally incompetent.

You've raised an interesting point. Why would 5 digits be most successful? Why don't we still have creatures with 6, 7, and 8 digits?

I'm beginning to think of an explanation, but it requires that we discard "trial and error" as the term for what happens. "Trial and error" implies that nature tried all sorts of digit numbers, and found that 5 was best, and stuck to it. I think it is more accurate to think in terms of what you said in the first sentence: that so many animals are descended from 5-digit ancestors. The fact that our ancestors had 5 digits explains why we do, but does not imply that 5 digits was best. It may be that the animal with 5 digits had some other set of characteristics that made it a better predator, and it out-competed the others. Or maybe the mutation that affected the shoulders, so that it could walk rather than paddle, occurred in a 5-digit animal, and the more-digit animals never had such a mutation.

Evolution proceeds by contingency, not direction. Once the Acanthastega types of animals arose, there was a diversity of them, with varying digit numbers. But, no new mutation will not occur in all of the species at once; it can't happen. So, different species must follow different evolutionary paths. Only one of these--which happened to have 5 digits--enjoyed a mutation that put it on the road to amphibians.

Indeed, I would think that creationists would have a hard time explaining all of the extinctions, and the vast array of different life forms that have come and gone. The ad hoc explanation is that they were all things that god created initially, but he decided they were somehow bad, and he killed 'em all in the flood, and somehow (miracles, I guess), they sorted themselves into different layers and different distributions throughout the world as the flood poured sediment onto the world. I guess they see this as no more fantastical than the idea that these weird creatures ever existed in the first place.

[Curious]

..."Trial and error" implies that nature tried all sorts of digit numbers, and found that 5 was best, and stuck to it... The fact that our ancestors had 5 digits explains why we do, but does not imply that 5 digits was best...

It was not my intention to suggest 5 was the best number of digits(although it certainly could not have been considerably worse than others, all things considered).I merely used this as an example of how this apparently "intelligent" design failed utterly in terms of survival.

Indeed... creationists... ad hoc explanation is that they were all things that god created initially, but he decided they were somehow bad, and he killed 'em all in the flood, and somehow (miracles, I guess), they sorted themselves into different layers and different distributions throughout the world as the flood poured sediment onto the world.

What you mention here is an example of the creationists ignoring not only scientific evidence but also scriptural reference in an attempt to support their seemingly untenable position as below shows clearly(taken from Torah)

Bereishit 7:23
[He] obliterated every being that was on the surface of the ground; from man to animals, to creeping creatures, and to the birds of the heaven. they were obliterated from the earth. Only Noach and those with him in the ark survived.

Obliterated from the earth means to wipe out all traces. According to this the deluge would not have preserved a single animal that perished in the flood.

BTW interesting post Jose and good topic QED