How We Detect Design

[The Cadet]

I originally posted (a slightly modified version of) this in the "Evolution/Creation on Trial" thread, but I feel it's perhaps worth its own thread, as the discussion of "is X designed" comes up a lot, and is clogging up no less than two different threads I'm involved in here. Let's move it here, eh?

There's an important problem when considering design. Attempts to call something "designed" necessarily fall back on comparisons to design by humans. We see this in every argument made, and even when it is not explicitly stated, it is there, as we as humans have experienced almost no other form of design.

So where's the problem with this? Simple. Our "design"? Part of nature. We, humans, are part of nature. This distinction we make between our design and natural processes is entirely artificial, and while it is a useful one to make in some scenarios (anthropology, for example), it's an utterly confusing one in the context of evolution and abiogenesis. What's more, because virtually our only reference point for design is "our design", what we really end up distinguishing is "natural processes" and "natural processes".

Here's the essence of what I'm getting to. This complex machine?

Made by nature.

So what does this mean? It means in essence that in discerning "design" among things like this, what we are distinguishing is not "design vs nature". It's "designed by X vs. not designed by X". This completely shifts the issue, and offers us actual useful ways of modeling and discussing it. So how do we determine whether a certain entity designed something?

This is a non-trivial problem when it comes to humans. Some landscapes designed by professional architects will be designed explicitly to parallel naturally occurring landscapes. Certain naturally occurring structures look like they were carved by human tools, despite simply being the product of natural erosion. And we generally know what humans are capable of throughout history, what the hallmarks of human design are, and in many cases, we can go back and say, "Ah, that's who designed that, there's their signature".

In other words, we can objectively recognize specified design by looking at what we know organism X has designed, and then comparing the object we have with what we know occurs outside the purview of organism X and what we know organism X can and does do. Notice how this is necessarily dependent on the organism! If we were to look for evidence of beaver design, we would not use the same set of objects for our comparisons as if we were to look for evidence of bumblebee design, nor human design. In the case of human design, we have a wide and deep range of things to look at, and to compare to. We have language as a fairly clear distinguisher - something that non-human processes could produce only as a bizarre coincidence and which humans produce all the time. We have metalworking as a distinguisher. We have clayworking and pottery. And so on, and so forth.

This sort of methodology is fairly robust and can be judged by objective criteria. Indeed, it's this sort of method used by various flavors of zoologists to determine what kind of animal made a particular kind of nest.

But now we're presented with an object you claim was designed. By a different designer. One whose signature we do not know; one whose capabilities we are unaware of; one whose hallmarks are unclear, and one whose very existence is based largely on the claim that a particular object must have been designed by this designer. I'm sorry, that's not good enough. That's not how we recognize human design. That's not how we recognize any sort of specified design.

So what do we know your designer has designed? What do we know your designer can do? What have we established that this designer has designed? We haven't even established this designer's existence yet? Well, shoot.

Look, if you want to provide some alternative objective way of determining whether something is designed or not, or whether something is designed by a particular entity or not, then by all means, let's hear it! Thus far, I have heard of no other robust mechanism to distinguish design from non-design, particularly without any established work of the designer in question. But you need to provide this mechanism, and it needs to be robust and testable. We should be able to take your mechanism and demonstrate with reasonable surety that things we know are designed (by a certain thing) are designed (by that certain thing), and things we know are not designed (by a certain thing) are not designed (by that certain thing). Make any sense?


@stevevw @Oncedeceived

 

[SkyWriting]

We should be able to take your mechanism and demonstrate with reasonable surety that things we know are designed (by a certain thing) are designed (by that certain thing), and things we know are not designed (by a certain thing) are not designed (by that certain thing). Make any sense?

Nope.
Ford autos are made somewhere and designed by somebody. China, Japan, or the US....I dunno.

Peach-a-rines are Peach & Tangerine hybrids designed somewhere by somebody. Grown....I duuno where.

 

[The Cadet]

Nope.
Ford autos are made somewhere and designed by somebody. China, Japan, or the US....I dunno.

Peach-a-rines are Peach & Tangerine hybrids designed somewhere by somebody. Grown....I duuno where.

...If your model of detecting design cannot objectively and correctly tell you whether these objects were designed, then your model needs some tweaking. That's the point of the quoted excerpt.

 

[AV1611VET]

So where's the problem with this?

The LAYHER scaffolding booth is upside down?

 

[SkyWriting]

...If your model of detecting design cannot objectively and correctly tell you whether these objects were designed, then your model needs some tweaking. That's the point of the quoted excerpt.

Yes.
Which model would you like me to change?

Proven in 1931 by Kurt Gödel, these theories say that with any given set of logical rules, except for the most simple, there will always be statements that are undecidable, meaning that they cannot be proven or disproven due to the inevitable self-referential nature of any logical systems that is even remotely complicated

 

[The Cadet]

Yes.
Which model would you like me to change?

Proven in 1931 by Kurt Gödel, these theories say that with any given set of logical rules, except for the most simple, there will always be statements that are undecidable, meaning that they cannot be proven or disproven due to the inevitable self-referential nature of any logical systems that is even remotely complicated

Do you have either:

• A useful, consistent model for objectively determining design from non-design
• A critique of my model

If not, please stop posting.

 

[SkyWriting]

Do you have either:
A useful, consistent model for objectively determining design from non-design

• A critique of my model
  If not, please stop posting.

Make any sense?

Nope.
Ford autos are made somewhere and designed by somebody. China, Japan, or the US....I dunno.
Peach-a-rines are Peach & Tangerine hybrids designed somewhere by somebody. Grown....I duuno where.

So, no.
There are no such models.

 

[mark kennedy]

So what do we know your designer has designed? What do we know your designer can do? What have we established that this designer has designed? We haven't even established this designer's existence yet? Well, shoot.

Here is a classic example of an argument for design that Charles Darwin says he thoroughly enjoyed saying it was his favorite reading in college. He went on to say that math was his least favorite but in the end math was most useful and Paley's writings were least useful. That's the whole problem with Natural Theology, its thought provoking and fascinating but inevitably speculative.

The eye is of no use at the time when it is formed. It is an optical instrument made in a dungeou; constructed for the refraction of light to a focus, and perfect for its purpose, before a ray of light has had access to it; geo metrically adapted to the properties and action of an element with which it has no communication. It is about indeed to enter into that communication; and this is precisely the thing which evidences intention. It is providing for the future in the closest sense which can be given to these terms; for it is providing for a future change, not for the then subsisting condition of the animal, not for any gradual progress or advance in that same condition. (Natural Theology, William Paley)
​

I'm not much into the Intelligent Design approach but it's been pretty popular among scientists and theologians down through the centuries. The latest is Irreducible Complexity, Intelligent Design arguments have a small number of peer reviewed articles:

Crick, F.H.C., and Orgel, L.E., Directed Panspermia, Icarus, Volume 19, Pages 341-346, 1973

Axe, D.D., Estimating the Prevalence of Protein Sequences Adopting Functional Enzyme Folds, Journal of Molecular Biology, Volume 341, Issue 5, Pages 1295-1315, Aug 2004

Behe, M.J., and Snoke, D.W., Simulating Evolution By Gene Duplication of Protein Features that Require Multiple Amino Acid Residues, Protein Science, Volume 13, Number 10, Pages 2651-2664, Oct 2004

Lönnig, W-E., Dynamic Genomes Morphological Stasis and the Origin of Irreducible Complexity, Dynamical Genetics, Pages 101-119, 2005

Couvreur, P., and Vauthier, C., Nanotechnology: Intelligent Design to Treat Complex Diseases, Pharmaceutical Research, Volume 23, Number 7, Jul 2006

Meyer, S.C., The Origin Of Biological Information And The Higher Taxonomic Categories, Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington, Volume 117, Number 2, Pages 213-239, May 2007

Marks, R.J., and Dembski, W.A., Conservation of Information in Search: Measuring the Cost of Success, Systems Man and Cybernetics: Part A Systems and Humans, IEEE Transactions, Volume 39, Issue 5, Pages 1051-1061, Sep 2009​

It's interesting to note that at the top of the list is a paper co-wrote by Francis Crick. Information theory is a statistical argument that I honestly don't understand. The gene duplication seems like a reasonably sound argument against one of the patently absurd Darwinian assumptions, fish in a barrel really. The Meyer paper makes a dynamite argument focusing on the Cambrian Explosion which Darwinians no longer even try to argue against.

Grace and peace,
Mark

 

[mark kennedy]

Double post...

 

[The Cadet]

Nope.
Ford autos are made somewhere and designed by somebody. China, Japan, or the US....I dunno.
Peach-a-rines are Peach & Tangerine hybrids designed somewhere by somebody. Grown....I duuno where.

So, no.
There are no such models.

Really?

I have seen videos of people putting together cars. I've seen countless examples of humans building automobiles. I know that humans tend to build vehicles, and I can examine numerous examples thereof. In fact, in every single case where we've checked, automobiles have always been made by humans and never been made by anything else. There are no known processes other than humans known to produce automobiles. This is exactly what this framework is built for - distinguishing between design and non-design. Due to the fact that all known examples of Ford autos (and indeed, all autos) are designed by humans, we can reasonably conclude that this particular Ford auto was almost certainly designed by humans.

Peach-a-rines are Peach-Nectarine hybrids that are very difficult to find solid information on. Ostensibly, all known hybrids have been engineered by humans. I am not aware of any Peach-a-rines that exist outside of human breeding. However, given that they are ostensibly the same species, it is possible that they could occur in nature. I'm not currently aware of any wild hybrids, nor am I aware of the potential hurdles to these existing, so we'd need someone who actually knows these things to evaluate this further. I'm not sure how you consider this a particular hurdle to the thrust of my argument.

 

[Davian]

 

[The Cadet]

Here is a classic example of an argument for design that Charles Darwin says he thoroughly enjoyed saying it was his favorite reading in college. He went on to say that math was his least favorite but in the end math was most useful and Paley's writings were least useful. That's the whole problem with Natural Theology, its thought provoking and fascinating but inevitably speculative.

The eye is of no use at the time when it is formed. It is an optical instrument made in a dungeou; constructed for the refraction of light to a focus, and perfect for its purpose, before a ray of light has had access to it; geo metrically adapted to the properties and action of an element with which it has no communication. It is about indeed to enter into that communication; and this is precisely the thing which evidences intention. It is providing for the future in the closest sense which can be given to these terms; for it is providing for a future change, not for the then subsisting condition of the animal, not for any gradual progress or advance in that same condition. (Natural Theology, William Paley)​

​

It's not just speculative; we know it's wrong. We understand very well how the eye evolved via natural processes. Indeed, the fact that Paley was so convinced of the eye's design is a sure sign that, in fact, the illusion of design is a real effect and not a positive indicator that something has been designed.

I'm not much into the Intelligent Design approach but it's been pretty popular among scientists and theologians down through the centuries.

Actually, the modern intelligent design movement is not science and is not considered science by anyone other than creationists and its own members.

Behe, M.J., and Snoke, D.W., Simulating Evolution By Gene Duplication of Protein Features that Require Multiple Amino Acid Residues, Protein Science, Volume 13, Number 10, Pages 2651-2664, Oct 2004

Because you mentioned this one specifically as "debunking patently absurd darwinian assumptions", I feel the need to point out that it's been torn to shreds. Behe's results are based entirely on mathematical errors and unwarranted assumptions about biological systems. It's basically your typical intelligent design trick: claim that something could not have evolved a certain way (that is already nearly impossible anyways and almost certainly not how it came about), then claim that you could not reproduce it, and that therefore the organism couldn't have evolved. It's complete nonsense.

Behe is seen today more or less in the same light as Peter Duesburg - a promising scientist who went off the deep end and whose contributions to biology sank to an abysmal level, attacking the science with flailing, incompetent attacks that really shouldn't have gotten published in the first place. (Okay, granted, he doesn't have the body count of Duesburg, but I'm too lazy to find an alternative example for this case.)

Meyer, S.C., The Origin Of Biological Information And The Higher Taxonomic Categories, Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington, Volume 117, Number 2, Pages 213-239, May 2007

[...]

The Meyer paper makes a dynamite argument focusing on the Cambrian Explosion which Darwinians no longer even try to argue against.

A dynamite argument that he had to get his friend to sneak through peer review for him. I hate to be that guy, but this paper was effectively not reviewed. The journal upped its standards afterwards as a result, and retracted the paper. Also, it took me all of about 30 seconds to find "Darwinians" completely demolishing the arguments made in the paper. It is not a good paper. It really shows that Meyer is not a biologist, nor a paleontologist, nor anything else that gives him legitimate expertise in the fields he claims to work in. This paper is garbage.

And of course, none of these have anything to do with how you detect design.

 

[capnhi9er]

Your calling that incredibly complex man MADE structure "Made by nature" is philosophical obfuscation.

Let me give you a hint:

The Old Man of the Mountain in New Hampshire was NOT designed. It was made by random natural processes. (see 1955 US postage stamp, 2000 US quarter and Wikipedia but don't bother to drive to New Hampshire, it fell down.) Mount Rushmore WAS designed.

Look, if you want to provide some alternative objective way of determining whether something is designed or not...
@stevevw @Oncedeceived

Design and engineering require:
• Intelligence (wind and rain have no intelligence)
• Intent (wind and rain had no intention of creating a face)
• Manipulation of abstract concepts, objects and relationships by intelligence with the intent of producing a desired result (wind and rain had no result in mind)
• Production of something that is intended to produce the expected result (ok, wind and rain did produce "something" that we can interpret as a face
• Successful engineering also requires that the product actually produces the intended result. Although failure to work right is not proof that the product was not designed.

Another hint:

Mount Rushmore WAS designed. If you can't tell the difference I feel sorry for you.

 

[SkyWriting]

Really?

I have seen videos of people putting together cars. I've seen countless examples of humans building automobiles.

Hand built auto's are rare. Most are created by robotic assembly.
Your analysis fails to pinpoint the source.
You cannot see into the past.

Peach-a-rines are Peach-Nectarine hybrids that are very difficult to find solid information on. Ostensibly, all known hybrids have been engineered by humans. I am not aware of any Peach-a-rines that exist outside of human breeding. However, given that they are ostensibly the same species, it is possible that they could occur in nature. I'm not currently aware of any wild hybrids, nor am I aware of the potential hurdles to these existing, so we'd need someone who actually knows these things to evaluate this further. I'm not sure how you consider this a particular hurdle to the thrust of my argument.

As you say...they may occur naturally.
Your analysis fails to pinpoint the source.
You cannot see into the past.

So what is your model again? I'm not seeing any outline
or template or anything.

 

[The Cadet]

Your calling that incredibly complex man MADE structure "Made by nature" is philosophical obfuscation.

It's only important to help us understand that our design is not significantly distinct in type (rather, only in scale) when compared to designs formed by other animals, which allows us useful tools to investigate design, and a useful framework for understanding how we detect design.

Design and engineering require:
• Intelligence (wind and rain have no intelligence)
• Intent (wind and rain had no intention of creating a face)
• Manipulation of abstract concepts, objects and relationships by intelligence with the intent of producing a desired result (wind and rain had no result in mind)
• Production of something that is intended to produce the expected result (ok, wind and rain did produce "something" that we can interpret as a face
• Successful engineering also requires that the product actually produces the intended result. Although failure to work right is not proof that the product was not designed.

This... doesn't really help you much if you're trying to prove that X is designed. It works into my point, really - any attempt to go from the object and try to deduce the designer means we're looking at this backwards and need a different method. If design and engineering require intelligence, and all you have is an object, then you can't work backwards from that and say, "this object must have had intelligence". This is sort of my point above. But we don't have a designer. We don't have intent, we don't have access to the mind, we don't have intelligence, we don't even have intent for a particular result. All we have is a product which seems to do something, and we're trying to conclude that all the other things exist. Even if my model is flawed, I don't think you can go from Object X -> Designer of X without a whole lot of inference based on other things we know about this designer.

Another hint:
View attachment 160538
Mount Rushmore WAS designed. If you can't tell the difference I feel sorry for you.

Of course I can tell the difference; we know one of these was designed, and we can point to numerous objective factors. Wind and rain are not so precise. We can see tool marks if we zoom in on mount rushmore. We know that people built it. That kinda stacks the deck in our favor, cognitively, to begin with. We can see countless examples of weathered erosions and countless examples of human carvings, and every single example of a smooth carving seeming to show clear facial features will fall into the former category. We can apply my method, or we can apply the method of "go to the archives" (which works just as well for things like this). What we cannot apply is the "I calls 'em like I sees 'em" method advocated by many ID advocates on this forum. Because that is not a method. That's a baseless assertion.

 

[mark kennedy]

It's not just speculative; we know it's wrong. We understand very well how the eye evolved via natural processes. Indeed, the fact that Paley was so convinced of the eye's design is a sure sign that, in fact, the illusion of design is a real effect and not a positive indicator that something has been designed.

That would be true if your opinion were the only consideration.

Actually, the modern intelligent design movement is not science and is not considered science by anyone other than creationists and its own members.

Define science.

Because you mentioned this one specifically as "debunking patently absurd darwinian assumptions", I feel the need to point out that it's been torn to shreds. Behe's results are based entirely on mathematical errors and unwarranted assumptions about biological systems. It's basically your typical intelligent design trick: claim that something could not have evolved a certain way (that is already nearly impossible anyways and almost certainly not how it came about), then claim that you could not reproduce it, and that therefore the organism couldn't have evolved. It's complete nonsense.

Well at least that round had a link if not an actual argument.

Behe is seen today more or less in the same light as Peter Duesburg - a promising scientist who went off the deep end and whose contributions to biology sank to an abysmal level...

Behe followed a path almost identical to Darwin, both accepted what their professors where telling them without reservation. Later in their lives they would begin question the status quo, Behe actually reverting to a design argument that goes back to antiquity. The modern response is ridicule and fallacious personal remarks, deep bias and virtually no regard to reason or evidence in its critique of religious and philosophical views they know nothing about.

A dynamite argument that he had to get his friend to sneak through peer review for him. I hate to be that guy, but this paper was effectively not reviewed. The journal upped its standards afterwards as a result, and retracted the paper. Also, it took me all of about 30 seconds to find "Darwinians" completely demolishing the arguments made in the paper. It is not a good paper. It really shows that Meyer is not a biologist, nor a paleontologist, nor anything else that gives him legitimate expertise in the fields he claims to work in. This paper is garbage.

Nice that you are actually adding links, what your flaming retort lacks is actual substance. Meyer does have a fascinating discussion of the Cambrian and the origin of biological information which like Abiogenesis all Darwinians insist on by never quantify, qualify or defend.

And of course, none of these have anything to do with how you detect design.

Actually there are two means determined, contrivances and irreducible complexity but your too self satisfied with these flaming ad hominems to notice.

Have a nice day
Mark

 

[The Cadet]

Hand built auto's are rare. Most are created by robotic assembly.
Your analysis fails to pinpoint the source.

Humans. It doesn't matter that they made robots which then made the cars. It's not a meaningful distinction in this case. If I were to tell you, "My grandmother baked this cake yesterday" and your response was "No, the oven did", everyone would call you a pedant and grumble in annoyance. If you were to follow that up with "therefore you have no valid way of determining where this pie came from" any reasonable human being would consider my follow-up of "Well, I guess you don't want any pie then" to be completely reasonable. And then you're shut out of the campus pie-eating party and I don't think you'd want that.

You cannot see into the past.

This has nothing to do with the argument at hand; please do not drag this into my thread, thank you. Your historical solipsism and denial of almost all scientific endeavor is noted and I just don't care; it is not the topic at hand, it is not relevant to the topic at hand, and if you keep bringing it up I will report it.

So what is your model again? I'm not seeing any outline
or template or anything.

To vastly simplify what I said above (and I should probably put this in the first post above) the model attempts to provide an objective criteria for measuring whether an object was designed by a certain entity or not by contrasting things we know are designed by that entity with things that we know are not designed by that entity. We can use this method to robustly identify design, but we require a lot of previous knowledge about what the organism can and does design, and what other mechanisms are available. It's my contention that all valid attempts to identify design follow either this method or the "I know it was designed because I have the blueprints right here and/or the designer told me" method (which strictly speaking is not quite "identifying" design in the same way). This, in turn, makes the idea of "I calls 'em like I sees 'em" design identification completely meaningless - that's not how we determine design at all, and it's not a valid mechanism.

 

[SkyWriting]

Hand built auto's are rare. Most are created by robotic assembly.
Your analysis fails to pinpoint the source.
You cannot see into the past.



As you say...they may occur naturally.
Your analysis fails to pinpoint the source.
You cannot see into the past.

Your historical solipsism and denial of almost all scientific endeavor is noted and I just don't care; it is not the topic at hand, it is not relevant to the topic at hand, and if you keep bringing it up I will report it.

I don't tolerate people who threaten. Bye.

 

[The Cadet]

Spoiler: Let's keep this thread on topic.

Define science.

Fundamentally, no definition of science is complete without the concept of falsification, a concept sorely lacking in intelligent design. As for a robust definition of "science", I recommend looking into the definitions provided from, among other things, Wikipedia, whose page on the subject is both broad and deep.

Well at least that round had a link if not an actual argument.

What, you want me to make the same points again? It's PRATT. Behe's work has been addressed and debunked. There's no need to go through it again and re-debunk it. It's also got, despite his best intentions, nothing to do with establishing design.

Behe followed a path almost identical to Darwin, both accepted what their professors where telling them without reservation. Later in their lives they would begin question the status quo, Behe actually reverting to a design argument that goes back to antiquity. The modern response is ridicule and fallacious personal remarks, deep bias and virtually no regard to reason or evidence in its critique of religious and philosophical views they know nothing about.

The difference being that Darwin coalesced his views into a testable predictive model of the universe that turned out to be phenomenally useful and robust, while Behe coalesced his into an untestable mess based only on a poorly-formulated argument from ignorance - "If the leading theory is wrong, mine must be correct". He fundamentally misunderstood the concept of the evidence he was examining.

Nice that you are actually adding links, what your flaming retort lacks is actual substance. Meyer does have a fascinating discussion of the Cambrian and the origin of biological information which like Abiogenesis all Darwinians insist on by never quantify, qualify or defend.

Um... What? I feel like I'm repeating myself here.

http://pandasthumb.org/archives/2004/08/meyers-hopeless-1.html

1. A central claim of Meyer’s is that novel genes have too much “CSI” to be produced by evolution. The first problem with this is that Meyer does not demonstrate that genes have CSI under Dembski’s definition (see above). The second problem is that Meyer cites absolutely none of the literature documenting the origin of new genes. For example, Meyer missed the recent paper in Current Opinion in Genetics and Development with the unambiguous title, “Evolution of novel genes.” The paper and 183 related papers can be found here. Many other references can be found linked from here.​

No, "Darwinians" have quantified, qualified, and defended the origin of biological information. The fact that Meyer claims that it has not been defended merely shows that he knows as much about the field he is critiquing as a third-grader. At this point, I'll leave examining the exploration of the Cambrian an exercise to you, because I don't know if doing this research is productive and I'm not sure how the evolutionary and biological models of the Cambrian relate to how we know things are designed. None of this is germane to the thread and none of this is particularly useful. If you would like to discuss the abysmal track record of the intelligent design community to put forward research that stands up to even minute scrutiny, this is probably not the right thread. The fact is that almost everything put out by that movement came down to one factor: "evolution could not happen". That was their hobby horse. Not "design happened" (to my knowledge, they never put forward one piece of evidence suggesting this), "evolution didn't happen". However, the problem with this is that proving evolution wrong does not automatically prove your pet theory, particularly a supernatural, unfalsifiable pet theory, right. This is perhaps the greatest failing of ID as a movement. If you want to discuss this, we can make another thread. I'd like for this one to stay on the topic of how we identify design.

Actually there are two means determined, contrivances and irreducible complexity

How do either of these get us to design? Would you care to cite the relevant excerpt? I have little interest in reading a 26-page document full of complete misinformation by a layman in the field that was not published in peer review, but if there's any particular excerpt of it that discusses these topics, I'll gladly address it.

Although seriously, "irreducible complexity" doesn't get us to "therefore design" unless "therefore design" is baked straight into the definition. An irreducible complex system, according to Behe, is: "Irreducible complexity is just a fancy phrase I use to mean a single system which is composed of several interacting parts, and where the removal of any one of the parts causes the system to cease functioning." None of this prevents any other function within the organism. In fact, the bacterial flagellum, Behe's favorite hobby horse, can be shown to evolve gradually over numerous steps, with each step producing an advantage to the organism. Not until very late in the process do any of these 42 unique proteins shape up to act like a flagellum, but beforehand they simply serve other useful roles in the organism.

Behe likes to counter by pointing out how unlikely this is, but he's looking at it backwards, and ignoring the countless other paths the organism could have took; acting as though his numerator is 1 when in fact is quite a lot larger than that.

There's no case to be made that irreducible complexity disproves evolution. But there's even less of a case to be made that it indicates design. What about irreducible complexity necessitates design and disallows alternative explanations?

 

[OldWiseGuy]

Everything was designed by God.