Intelligent Design: An Engineer's Perspective

So I've tried to stay away from this bubbling morass, but I feel I can no longer stand silent. The link above is to a story about Cornell's president denouncing the idea of Intelligent Design as science. However, I feel that to be as effective as possible we need to attack on common ground. The typical response from the scientific community is "It's not science, leave us alone you morons". And they are right. However, we also saw how effective logic was in other arenas ("It wasn't about WMDs, leave us alone you morons").

On that note, I will now give my argument against intelligent design by attacking the foremost premise that supporters use: structures appearing in nature are too complex to have randomly occurred. For my case study, I will use the human body as an example. So without further adieu, here it is:

A Rebuttal of Intelligent Design

Dr. Duke Nukem, Ph.D, Engineer, Computer Scientist, All-Around Nerd

As an engineer, it is preposterous to me that some may be so bold as to say that the complexity found in nature is an argument against evolution. On the contrary, I believe that one of the most complex structures found in nature -- the human form -- is so innately flawed that it practically condemns the idea of an 'intelligent designer' from the start. Let't take a look at some specific points of interest.

1. Failure Modes/Lack of Redundancy - Any good engineer knows that SPFs (single points of failure) are the worst design mistakes you can make. Yet look at the human body -- it's chock full of SPFs. From the heart to the brain to the liver, we are without a doubt single-string machines. My question is: are we stripped down versions of some better, more robust system? If there were an 'intelligent designer', why would it hold back on us?
   



2. Unnecessary Complexity - After hundreds of years of trying to figure out the human body and its innerworkings, we still know so little of it. One of the key qualities of a good design is make it no more complex than necessary, and do it in a clean manner. If the human body were so intelligently designed, don't you think we'd be a little closer to figuring it out? And on a related note...
   



3. Lack of Documentation - Any good programmer knows that even the best design and implementation can be rendered worthless in someone else's hands without good documentation. What a rookie mistake! The human body, to me, reminds me of several hundred lines of assembly code, but completely undocumented. Ask any computer scientist how they feel about that predicament and watch them tremble and break into cold sweats.
   



4. Defect Ratio - The real measure of any process is its yield, or the number of acceptable units divided by the total number of units produced. Now some may argue that this point is subjective, but here goes: it seems to me that the number of defective units (with a person being one unit) in service at any given time is pretty damn big. Now, don't you think that said 'intelligent designer', with all the power of the universe at its disposal, might take the time to implement some really damn stringent quality control processes? I mean, if you've got all the time in the world, with every possible resource available to you, and you knew the requirements were right (which is an assumption that I make about this proposed 'intelligent designer'), you'd produce a perfect product. I know this to be true, as does every other proacticing engineer worth half a red cent. And lest you think I'm biased against a particular segment of the population, I'm not. The proof? I consider myself a defective unit.
   



5. Self-Desctruct Mechanism - Possibly the strongest argument against intelligent design. I mean, it is waaay too easy to 86 yourself. Don't you think an 'intelligent designer' would put in a myriad of safeguards to prevent us from pushing the Big Red Button?
   

There you have it. If anyone finds flaw with the arguments, we will be opening a bugtraq queue on this essay, so please document all bugs locally until we can collect them all.