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Some have said that the universe appears to have been designed intelligently and this has been cited as an argument in favour of a divine creator. Arguments have gone something along the lines of "Take the complexity of the human eye, whether it came into being 6000 years ago or evolved over millions upon millions of years, it looks kind of like how we would design a camera." There is a reason this argument falls flat on it's face. The same reason an argument in favour of the chicken coming before the egg would fall flat on it's face. There is a temporal bias at play wherein you see how we have designed things first and you see those same patterns in nature around you second; there lies the mistake because those patterns came first and are the basis of how we design things intelligently. The universe is not modelled after intelligence, rather our intelligence is modelled after the universe. If you stumble upon a watch that may prove there is a watch maker but without time and space and the nature of those things being what they are, neither the watch or the watch maker would exist. Intelligence wouldn't exist. The universe was not designed intelligently, the universe designs intelligence. I am purely agnostic when it comes to the existence of the divine or some kind of creation. If something comes down from the sky with seemingly god like powers I'll be assuming technology that I don't understand before "This can only be a god." The Teleological argument has just never sat right with me due to this strange temporal bias at play within the minds of the religious and the spiritual. I'm open to hearing better arguments in favour of the existence of some kind of cosmic entity that actively cares about me as an individual but intelligent design just is not one of them. It would be like building a model of the golden gate bridge and then claiming the architect of golden gate bridge used your model. Unless you have a time machine it just doesn't make much sense.

I don't think so. AAMOF, ideas like "we live in a simulation" or panspermia sound to me dangerously close to trying to revive the idea of an intelligent creator, but with an aura of scientism about it. All of them (and the ones to come) equally vulnerable to the infinite-regression argument: Who simulated the simulators?, and Who seeded the seeders? etc.

Poles can be a problem for politicians ..

We were looking for a design that provides lift. That’s function, not form, which is what Genady was pointing out.

If you mean they are not an exact replica I agree. If you are saying they don't share 'design' features then I disagree.

@MSC and @Genady I think you two fellows are taking slightly different meanings on "design from nature." My ornithopter was to make the point that we see evolved structures in nature but then will innovate something different that is actually easier to craft and works better. I think MSC is saying that nature dictates certain structures because they just make sense for a purpose. A camera has to project an image onto an emulsion or CCD through a lens, the way an eye projects an image onto the retina through a lens, because the natural laws of optics suggest this is the way to do it. Genady is stressing that we seek certain goals in engineering something, but that we take our cue from natural laws and then go our own direction on innovating something. So we get jets instead of ornithopters, extension ladders instead of knotted vines, IC engines instead of mitochonddria, wheels instead of artificial feet, and so on. x-post with Genady

Yep. This is what happens when they try.

😁

That's from Life of Brian, if I'm not mistaken. I testify to the fact that the teleological argument has been receiving some attention lately. More of a cardiac massage, IMO.

I would hope that they, too, would urge you to look at the literature I expect that this has been studied, and you could find things out if you actually looked for answers. Yeah, that’s not it.

There shall, in that time, be rumors of things going astray, erm, and there shall be a great confusion as to where things really are, and nobody will really know where lieth those little things wi-- with the sort of raffia work base that has an attachment. At this time, a friend shall lose his friend's hammer and the young shall not know where lieth the things possessed by their fathers that their fathers put there only just the night before, about eight o'clock. Yea, it is written in the book of Cyril that, in that time, shall the third one...

I wonder if his sentence will prohibit associating with other felons. That would really cut down on options; so many of his former staff have been convicted.

Almost all our behaviour is a combination of a genetic basis, that kind of forms a certain baseline, but, especially when the brain is involved, environmental exposures, learning and other feedback modulates the outcome (after all, the brain requires input to develop). So the question of nature vs nurture is, based on what we now know, mostly nonsensical. There is no versus, there is an end. The only part that is often unknown is how much. Also note that many of these non-genetic exposures can happen before birth- exposure to hormones but also chemicals in the womb affect early neuronal development. And yes, homosexuality has been observed in at least 1,500 species, suggesting that it is a common, low-frequency outcome of how sexuality is wired https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-019-1019-7. There have been quite a lot hypotheses why it may arise, and why genes favouring homosexuality persist. Note that genetics is not a 1:1 carbon copy of traits. Combination of genes can result in a wide diversity of traits which can be quite different from the parent. If it wasn't, there wouldn't be any benefit to sexual reproduction and we would more likely continue to procreate e.g. via parthenogenesis. What seems to be the case in humans is that the foundation of sexual orientation is laid early in childhood and, once developed, it is fairly stable. I think it is not yet known if and how much flexibility there is in the developmental path to sexual (and other) identity. There are suggestions that events in early fetal development already could be an important factor. One clue is the fact at least in men, the birth order sees to have a highly reproducible impact. Across many groups men with same-sex attraction have a greater number of older brothers, than heterosexual men. One hypothesis is that had a male child have some sort of immune response that creates antibodies specific to protein involved in male brain development. These antibodies increase with each male fetus and somehow increase the likelihood of developing same-sex preferences. There is some vague support for that (mostly the enrichment of antibodies against certain fetal proteins in mothers with multiple male children), but evidence remains at the correlation stage. So in short, it is complicated and not resolved yet.