Etu Malku wrote:From another angle:
A human designing a computer program is free to incorporate improvements from programs developed by other humans in other parts of the world. On the other hand, this is precisely what we do *not* see in biological systems. (Horizontal transfer does occur, but not separated by space and time.)
The genome of humans does not include evolutionary improvements discovered by flowering plants, for example. If today's biological diversity is the product of "intelligent design", it is entirely remarkable that this designer chose to make life appear to be arranged in a branching hierarchy consistent with common descent, without incorporating improvements across different branches.
If life is designed, why does it look so much as if it evolved?
Why cant evolution be part of the 'design'?
As a veteran programmer, I can assure two things:
1) Incorporating improvements (Aka "reuse of code " in accordance with object oriented principles) is confined precisiely to the context of the program itself. On any given day, a program is designed for a specific solution. Because of this fact, any robot, which can handle 32 flavors of ice cream, will most definitely crash when the 33rd flavor (new problem) is introduced. Thus, there is no accounting for anything in a random universe and That is the way of ALL things in the randomness of the Universe. So, Why do humans prevail past the 32 flavors? Our 'program' is bigger than mere randomness. How do we overcome the randomness? The design for us, which is counter-intuitive to the robots... has accounted for all such contingencies....despite the randomness... We don't crash at the introduction of the 33rd flavor , or any subsequent flavor after that... Finally, if you can identify and list every contingency...then you are to be congratulated, for having discovered the proof, that an ordered universe does in fact exist.
2) Human Genome..was , is and always will be nothing more than the map of geno/pheno type expressions for all organic, carbon based life. Such a map cannot speak to 'improvement or degradation' Engineering of the map, might. But any engineering of that map falls squarely under the spell of "rationalism", which again, implies an ordered arrangement of things.
With respect to programming, such are the things that genetic engineers do best. Unfortunately we can't define random and order. (we try) In fact I submit there actually is no such thing as random. At the end of the day, an outcome, is precisely the result of a compelling arrangement of contingenies and conditions...(AKA an order), whether we recognize this or not.




