On Designers

               On Designers

               Once a rabbi, discussing evolution and intelligent design with me, mentioned a Cyber 205 supercomputer. He asked: can such a thing come to be merely by evolving? Did it not need a designer?

               My reply: yes in fact it did come to be by evolving; for it was a successor to previous models of computer, less developed, leading back through adding machine to abacus to counting board. Nor did the Cyber 205 have a single designer. It had designers, plural, each one attending to some small detail of the emerging design; but that emerging design had no one person organizing it; it instead self-organized. It had to; no single human mind can comprehend it.

               Human society in general is self-designed in this sense. It is, in general, an evolving system of independent agents operating with minimal central control. Some parts of human society are built in terms of intelligent design - that is, central control - but their actual level of social control, and the actual value of that control, is notoriously limited.

               For instance, suppose that I were to order a loaf of bread delivered to a certain address; lo and behold, it arrives. That required a lot of social design. The wheat had to be grown, then harvested, then milled; the flour had to be trucked to the baker, the baker had to bake the bread, and the trucker had to deliver the bread. Along the way there were also bankers, traffic cops, and gas station clerks. That is a complex irreducible system. Does it follow that there must exist a Bread Commissar, who created and supervises the entire system?

               No! There is no need for such a meddler; instead these activities organized themselves by voluntary agreement within the free market. Indeed, experience has taught us that if some land ever did appoint a Bread Commissar, then his crowning achievement would be the shutdown of all bread production.

               Reasoning by analogy, I conclude that the complex subtle structure in the universe is not necessarily an argument for a single Designer. It could just as easily be an argument against one.