Southwind, two major points I think I am not getting across to you. I am going to take the liberty of reordering points, since I want to seperate ii into where we disagree on technolgy, and where we disagree on evolution.
When you say:
So, we're left comparing indifferent or successful mutations with beneficial design changes. If a designer sees some 'potential' (or even indifference) in a design modification, even though a further modification is required to realize that potential, as you describe above, that is no different from natural evolution. Provided a mutation isn't detrimental there's no reason why it should disappear.
It is completely unlike natural evolution because in design by mutation and selection you succeed or you don't, while in intelligent design there is a third category, "useful to the intelligent designer". Suppose I were to buy a new video card for my computer, and start it up. I see some beautiful graphics for few seconds, and then the computer freezes as it overheats. This is obviously detrimental to the purpose of the computer. This computer is useless to a computer user, but useful to a computer designer who needs now only through in cooling fans in order to make an improved computer.
I don't think you really understand how biological evolution works (not that I'm an expert, but my intuition and logic seem to carry me along far better than yours seem to do you). What you've described above with the video card is not
incremental change. You've essentially described a macro-mutation, not disimilar to giving a mouse the legs of a cat in one fell swoop! Clearly, a mouse would not survive such a radical change for similar reasons that your computer won't. Now, if we introduce the new video card into your computer by incremental change, then that allows the cooling fans, etc. also to keep up with the pace. I'm not sure whether macro-mutations occur and persist in nature, but even if they do they fall outside the scope of the purpose of the analogy, as does your computer example. They can be considered exceptions to the norm, and it's the norm that's generally under consideration.
Now, replace your macro-mutation video card example with incremental changes instead, and the computer works with no associated improvement to the cooling fans! Not only that, it works beneficially too! If you reach the point where the video card improves incrementally to one that overloads the computer, then yes, larger cooling fans will then be needed. But chances are the cooling fans will have become incrementally larger too themselves, over time, as the designer will become informed of the requirement for increased heat dissipation through the incremental changes to the video card.
By definition, the initial (poor) modification must have some potential benefit for the designer to retain it. If not, he would simply scrap it and return to go.
Thats just it. It has potential benefit for the designer. It has no benefit to a system without one.
No. Read closely. I wrote:
... must have some potential benefit for the designer to retain it
; not:
... must have some potential benefit for the designer.
I think you're getting confused over the function of the designer. The designer's function is to improve the product, which is achieved by the introduction of beneficial changes. In other words, beneficial changes are manifest as improvements to the product. Therefore, the designer cannot and would not deem a change 'beneficial' in any sense other than an improvement to the product. An improvement cannot and would not be deemed beneficial
to him if it's not beneficial to the product. How would such 'benefit' be identified as such, and measured?!
I think you are also discounting the concept of the third "bin" of useful to the designer when you say:
When you write 'radical', are you taking into account the fact that, at the micro level, the technology is, at best, only small steps removed from the previous design? Does the designer, for example, suddenly and unexpectedly stumble upon new materials and components that appear from thin air, or are those material and components 'evolved' over time?
Again in this situation the intelligent designer doesn't stumble upon the new materials and technologies. But the end user (the selection agent for your hypothetical robot) does. The rotary engine went through several iterations before it was suitable to replace any traditional combustion engine. These were seen and selected by the designer, an agent which doesn't exist in our natural algorithm. To the end user it did "appear from thin air".
In the case of the rotary engine the designer continuously placed himself in the shoes of the end user and made the iterative changes necessary to satisfy that end. Each change was, nonetheless, accepted only when it was deemed beneficial in the eyes of the designer, per his expectation of what would appeal to the potential end user. He essentially 'second guessed' what he thought would work and 'survive' in the environment that he proposed to introduce it. It's no different from introducing kangaroos into the Scottish Highlands. It, too, would 'appear from thin air', and its ability to survive would be determined by the suitability of its characteristics and features in the context of the environment to which it is exposed. The rotary engine, like the kangaroo in the Scottish Highlands, could as easily have failed to survive and quickly become extinct, just like Sir Clive Sinclair's C5 did, which was developed no differently, in principle, from how the rotary engine was. Sinclair simply failed to understand and appreciate the 'environment'.
The transition of material in electronics might be a more extreme example of materials that evolved, but emerged in the market place suddenly. To go from silicon chips to newer materials that allowed even faster chips to be built had a huge amount of "design only" stages. Before the first Galium-Arsenide chip appeared for a non-designer, there were modifications to machines to grow crystals, products used to measure characteristics of those wafers, prototype transistors that didn't function as well old Si transistors and on and on. How would your robot perform this function?
- Anybody want to buy this new transistor? No, the old style ones function better. Through it out.
- Anybody want to buy a wafer of this new material? No, the robot is the designer, I don't have use for a slab of GaAs.
- Want to buy the machines that can measure that build wafers? ...
So yes, to the intelligent designer, this material evolved over time. But again, said designer doesn't exist in your hypothetical scenerio. To us end users, circuits made up of transistor on brand new materials "appeared from thin air" in our new products.
Again, I don't think you're considering evolution and technological development at the micro-level, and incrementally. In all of the examples above, how did the designers determine what was better and what was worse? Improved functionality is determined in the context of what is required of the materials, and not the effect that those materials might happen to have on the end product of which they might or might not form part. The robot in the AA is only assembling devices from evolved components. You need to envisage additional robots lower down the evolutionary chain developing transistors and other components. Then you need to envisage even more robots even farther down the evolutionary chain developing the materials from which those components are made, etc. Each link in the evolutionary chain can be considered to be independent, i.e. the survival and extinction parameters are determined not by how the outputs of each link in the chain will perform in the context of the finished product, but by reference to the parameters that determine whether the output of each link is worse, the same or better than the stand-alone functionality of it's predecessor, and the competition. I'm sure many components in industry never even find their way into larger, more complex finished product because they become obsolete before they get the chance, because some bright spark (sorry, somebody with more accute intent and forethought!) goes and develops a superior component in parallel and introduces it into the market first. Again, what you have in mind are essentially macro-mutations.
The intelligent designer didn't leap frog steps, he stood on them. But to the intelligent designer they were steps, to your robot driven by the end user these are roadblocks rather than steps. A heap of products that are useless in a system without a designer.
Well I like analogies, but I'm afraid even I'm struggling a little with this one. Are you able to clarify what you have in mind when you describe the intelligent designer 'standing on' the stepping stones, and that the stepping stones form 'roadblocks' to the robot and not steps? What, exactly, do you see happening at these parts of the process?
