inelegant design [11/13/2006 08:00:36]

Here's one reason not to believe in intelligent design: the design isn't very intelligent. I don't just mean the extraneous bits like tonsils and appendices, or the huge percent of the genetic code that appears to be garbage.

Okay, the human body is an impressive bit of technology, but give us another hundred years of nanotech and genetic engineering, and I bet we can come up with something better.

Here's a feature request: cron. Even the simplest electronic or mechanical devices can be taught to keep time and schedule an event for a future time. Alarm clocks, for example. But my brain, neat as it is, doesn't seem to have that feature.

Why not? I seem to have a scheduling system that makes me want to sleep every 16 hours or so. I seem to have a system that makes me want to eat every few hours, regardless of the fact that I have more stored energy in the form of fat than I could use in a week. And I have similar drives for breathing and eating and drinking and sex and going to the bathroom and moving blood around and so forth.

It's a neat trick that all of these rhythms emerge spontaneously from the interworkings of millions and billions of tiny electrochemical processes, but that emergence is the very antithesis of design. A well designed system would have a clock, and various generic scheduling hooks. Unix, for example, has cron and at and anacron, and together these tools let you set up any kind of recurring system you want. And of course, even these are built on the even simpler mechanism of an electronic clock.

I actually agree with the creationists that an intelligently designed system isn't likely to evolve over time. A gas-powered car is an intelligently designed system, but it needs a whole infrastructure in place. An electric car powered by hydrogen or super capacitors is arguably an even more intelligent design, but there are so many hurdles to better batteries and the hydrogen economy that making these cars viable is going to be very very hard. Instead, we have a compromise: gas-electric hybrids, which take the existing systems and make them better.

If this evolutionary approach is practical for designing cars, why wouldn't it be practical for a god? Well, it might be. If someone wanted to seed the universe with intelligent life, then self-replicating nano-machines subject to mutation (for example, DNA) would be a great way to do that. But that's not the argument that creationists make, and even if it were, once you see that evolution works, you no longer need a god to explain how everything got here, which is good because it saves you the embarrassing question about how the god got there.

More importantly, a being sufficiently powerful enough to be called God ought to have enough resources that it could jump directly to an intelligent design. Given enough money, we could jump directly to hydrogen cars, but we're limited, so we take an evolutionary approach. In a hundred years, we might all have nano-pacemakers that give us cron right in our nervous system, so that instead of fighting our habits, we could just record or write macros explaining what we want our bodies to do, and then schedule those macros to fire off at the appropriate times.

I think there will come a point in the not so distant future when the improvements human beings can make to themselves and the machines we can create will be so impressive that when you look at an android or a modified human and compare that to the natural version, it will be obvious which one evolved randomly and which one was intelligently designed.

I didn't mean to write all this. All I really wanted to say is that it would be nice to have a cron-like system for my own life, and it would have been nice if my creators had given me one. Unfortunately, my creators, while very nice people, aren't genetic engineers, so I don't think they could do much about it.

Thankfully, on the eighth day, God created the Palm Pilot, so at least I can hack a prosthetic. :)