I'm claiming there is no 'obviousness' about it - certainly not from the end-product. The end-product DOES NOT have any information about how it was designed. None at all. Your computer does not hold within it all the information about the creators, their experiments, analysis, computers they based the design on etc... These are all inferences.
Looking at the history of succeding generations, one could probably have a fair guess as to whether something evolved, or was designed. Indeed one can often see similarities in style and can spot artefacts that have a common designer, or design school. Kamov Helicopters tend to have coaxial contra-rotating blades, whilst aerospatiale ones tend to have fan-in-fin, fenestron rotors.
Of course they are based on inferences, what is your point?
In
any almost any
normal conversation with someone, I think the consensus view would be that it is obvious that cars and aeroplanes are designed. Why else are there job adverts for
Automotive design engineers? Even if the people you are talking to don't have the in depth knowledge to appreciate that there is a job title of "Automotive design engineer", they will still know that designers exist. If they are British, they might have heard of
R J Mitchellthe "designer" of the Supermarine Spitfire.
I think I've already adequately explained this but YES. This is the whole damn point jimbob - we see idosyncrancies in biological systems that are hard to explain from the perspective of assuming a human-like designer would have been involved. This is due to how we think a design should look because we like to abstract things into modular components we can understand and reason about separately. Nature does not.
The point is not that intelligent input COULD NOT have been involved - very strictly speaking, the point it that it is not necessary (this is what Occam's Razor is all about) and certainly doesn't help explain things that we find to be poor examples of design. But the way you have strictly delineated it you can't explain why there are examples of what appears to be good design unless an intelligence was involved.
The point I'm making here is that there IS a large degree of cross-over.
Now moving closer to my area of knowledge: IC design, especially analogue design.
The components are modeled mathematically, and circuits designed with component values set as a result of calculations, these circuits are then tested in simulation before being committed to silicon. Because designers are notomniscient, these designs tend to rely on the properties of the components that are well modelled, and easily understood by humans.
It is also possible to use evolutionary algorithms, especially if the design is realised on an FPGA
WP
The results of the evolutionary algorithms are often more efficient (lower silicon cost etc) but they are far harder to analyse, because there was no analysis used to create the circuit design. It is easy for a trained eye to spot the differences between a human-design and one using an evolutionary algorithm.
This is still
not evolution, because the intelligent agency determined from the start
what the successful "design iteration" would do, if not
how it would do it
But the way you have strictly delineated it you can't explain why there are examples of what appears to be good design unless an intelligence was involved.
Why? If poor features are possible with evolution, so are good ones.
I don't actually like talking about the "function" of an evolved structure, as that implies forethought. The human eye sees, but the white of the eye also happens to be used as a signal.
