The Uncommon Descent blog has offered an interesting attempt at responding to an analogy of evolution. The analogy in question (like all analogies except those appreciated by cdesign proponentsists, apparently) compares the “evolution” of car designs to evolution in biology.
At UD, Gil Dodgen replies that this in fact undermines the argument for evolution, since in fact cars are produced by engineers, and thus each successive “species” of car is the result of design.
I wonder if they’ve thought this through. Are they really going to press this, so that we end up with a model in which the successively modified forms of organisms are to be explained by a group of well-meaning but ultimately not particularly advanced aliens who visit the planet regularly with improvements they’ve only just come up with? Do they really want to claim that there was not merely initial design but successive tinkering, on the analogy of designers of successive models of cars, to account for what we find in nature?
Since almost all of their support comes from religious believers, I can’t imagine how anyone will continue to support Intelligent Design’s creationism, if it envisages the creators as successive generations of engineers who are trying out new ideas as they go along.
At any rate, what gets lost on the analogically-challenged cdesign proponensists is that the human engineers in the analogy are superfluous in the biological realm. It has been shown time and again that natural selection and genetic variation can provide all the tinkering improvements necessary to achieve the same effect.
It’s just an analogy, and taking analogies too far is a pitfall in the sciences. But if those at UD are inclined to press the details of this analogy, I wonder how long it will be before they themselves feel uncomfortable with the implications.
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