Well once again, we're into that familiar territory known as "people using words to mean what they want them to mean, not what they actually mean". Though with words that haven't been subject to rigorous scientific attention, "what they actually mean" tends to be problematic too, even before duplicitous practitioners of apologetics enter the picture.
Indeed, as I've covered at length in the past, the word "design" involves some interesting issues, even if we concentrate solely upon human "design" activities. Ultimately, every instance of human "design", can be reduced to the following:
[1] Try something out;
[2] Discard it if it fails;
[3] build upon it if it succeeds.
Hmm, where have we seen this collection of processes before?
Which is one of the reasons, of course, why I exert effort to emphasise the
difference between human "design" and the fantasy process creationists try to conflate therewith, which I refer to as "supernatural magic design". Which is routinely defined by creationists, as a process involving
perfect foreknowledge of the outcome of the activity in question, something that humans have never had, even when working with a
mature technology whose system behaviours are well-documented. Though of course, the duplicitous shell game played with
mature technologies by creationists, when a far more apposite comparison would be with
infant technologies, is merely another aspect of creationist dishonesty amongst many. A tangential diversion to be pursued another time.
Which brings me to an essential point.
Namely, that
intent not only implies a goal, though this is actually irrelevant from the standpoint of dealing with the requisite apologetics, but also implies
exercising control over the steps taken by the process. If a system of interactions isn't exercising any control over key parts of the process, then intent is
by definition absent from that part of the system, and any attempt to refer to this as a "design" process purportedly isomorphic even to human "design", let alone supernatural magic design, fails at first base.
That is the key point. Evolutionary forces don't exercise direct control over the underlying chemistry. They let that chemistry do whatever it will. All that evolutionary forces do, is determine which instances of that chemistry are sufficiently competent to produce descendants at a given historical locus, and which are not - the latter ending up as lunch for the former. A high pass filter with the pass bar set at a fairly mediocre setting, isn't a "designer" in the sense usually associated with that word, even though the outcome of its action - entities with certain functions - looks deceptively like the product of a "designer" to the naive.
I was informed wonderfully on this matter by a computer program I wrote some time ago, featuring entities known as modular cellular automata. These are, quite simply, static cells in a matrix, which can take one of several defined states. A simple algorithm takes the state information from the matrix at generation N, and determines the states each cell in that matrix will take in generation N+1. It's as mindlessly deterministic a process as one could wish for (Conway's
The Game Of Life is related thereto).
One of the fun things I discovered, after I wrote that program, and put it through the "suck it and see" phase of testing once the bugs were removed, was this. A matrix of cells with no discernible pattern, can, in a short number of generations, transform into a matrix that excites the pattern matching area of human brains wonderfully. Furthermore, that patterened matrix can, in another short number of generations, transform into another matrix with no discernible pattern. Those cells aren't generating those patterns as a 'goal', or by 'intent', they're doing so simply because a mindless mechanical process generates that result. The existence of such phenomena, on its own, is wonderfully informative to the astute amongst us, about the manner in which our own capacity for pattern matching, coupled with our sometimes too-exuberant willingness to project our own intent upon our surroundings, can prove utterly misleading.
Consequently, attempts to characterise evolution as isomorphic to "design" fail miserably. There's even a limit to the extent to which evolution is
homomorphic thereto (keeping an eye on the precise mathematical language I've just introduced, and deliberately). I've characterised evolution in the past as consisting of the following three steps:
[1] Generate lots of variations;
[2] Discard the failures;
[3] Build upon the successes.
This, to the untrained eye, certainly looks homomorphic to the manner in which I presented human "design" above, but that earlier presentation was aimed at showing how our "design" activities share a far closer kinship with evolution than is suspected by many, and most emphatically
not intended as another example of "design" apologetics. I'll now elaborate. For those unfamiliar with the term 'homomorphism', this term implies the existence of
a structure preserving map between two systems. Well, the structure in question looks pretty similar between my two expositions, but of course, there's an all-important difference in that first step in each of the two. One has humans with complex brains generating the initial instances, with all the usual intent/goal/control baggage that implies, whilst the other has, in effect, mechanical processes generating the instances, though I'll understand readily, as a past chemistry student myself, if chemists bristle at having their subject described in such limiting terms. Consequently, although there
is a structure to preserve when mapping human "design" onto evolution (or vice versa), I'm aware of the essential
differences that make such a mapping utterly useless to pedlars of the usual apologetics. The moment one discovers that mechanical processes utrterly devoid of intent, or even sentience in its broadest or most limited forms, can generate the instances needed to launch that three step process, and can furthermore perform the tasks of the other two steps, the game is over with respect to the brand of "design" apologetics we see here all too often.
Now of course, we have a problem, in that characterising that three-step process above as "design", leaves the entire topic wide open to apologetic abuse, at the hands of miscreants taking ruthless advantage of uneducated or credulous audiences. Which not only stems from the multifarious issues already covered above, but from another issue I've yet to deal with - namely, how one defines the 'successes' in step [3]. Of course, in the world of evolutionary biology, 'success' is easily and simply defined, as an affirmative answer to the question "has X produced descendants?" Step [3], on the other hand, does
not admit of a well-defined universal criterion
independent of subjective human judgement, when humans are the generators in step [1]. What constitutes 'success' for one set of humans, seeking one goal, will constitute dismal failure for a different set of humans, with a different goal. "Does it work?", in the case of human activity, constitutes such a broad brush that its utility value as a defining criterion, is limited by being similarly open to subjective change across instances."Does it work?" is a useful first step along the way during our infant trials, but necessarily gives way to more precise specification later, and for different instances of the requisite human activity, those precise specifications will differ too. Evolutionary processes differ sufficiently substantively in that respect also, to render the homomorphism I expounded above apologetically useless in the face of an informed audience.
There's more to cover here, but this will suffice for the present.
by 
