by Ardea Skybreak
Revolutionary Worker #1170, October 13, 2002, posted at http://rwor.org
It is interesting to note that things that are actually designed by conscious "intelligent designers" (such as people) don't fit into a pattern of "nested hierarchy" (see main text). This has to do with the ways real "intelligent designers" actually design things. Consider, for instance, things like cars, airplanes, or musical instruments: new designs (or new "generations" of designs) of such objects are often said to "evolve" over time thanks to modifications of pre-existing models undertaken by their conscious human designers. New models are "derived" from earlier generations of cars, instruments, etc., and they typically combine some new features with a mix of older features retained from earlier models. And yet, unlike biological species or human languages, consciously designed objects resist any attempts to consistently classify them into nested hierarchies. Why is that? The reason is simply that "intelligent designers" are not limited to using and modifying only whatever components were available in the immediately preceding generation of designs; they can (and do) innovate and enrich their designs by tapping into a number of different evolutionary lines (not just closely "related" ones) and "skipping around" and sampling simultaneously among a number of different prior generations, not just the immediately preceding generation. In this way, conscious designers will often construct a novel design out of models which had not been at all closely related.
All this obviously makes possible a great deal of additional creative innovation. But, again, this greater creative flexibility inevitably leads to a bunch of designs which can no longer be made to fit neatly into any kind of consistently nested hierarchical progression of ancestor-descendant lineages.
Of course, as we have seen, biological evolution does also constantly produce novelty and innovation--but, left to its own devices, it does so through an unconscious process which is significantly constrained (limited) by the fact that it can build innovation and novelty only out of the inheritable variation that is present in the immediately preceding generation from which it is directly descended.
Nature on its own has no other means to evolve. But how likely do you think it is that any kind of supernatural intelligent designer (a god, in other words) would choose to impose on itself such limiting constraints?
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