Would any of you drive a car made by Darwin's ideas?

[Chas]

Every one of your respsonses (wether you realize it or not) included intellegence having been added to the "evolutionary development" of each item. However, the Darwinian scheme has no such provision.

Nonsense. In my example, I introduced a method of selection. Nothing more. In the examples given by Esquilax, the 'mutations' are random, only the selection-pressures are predetermined (as they are in the real world).

Intelligence is not required.

Except neither your example nor Esquilax's references are neo-Darwinian. They are evolutionary in some sense, but the selection criteria were created by intelligence. And that is what the OP was referring to.

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Every one of your respsonses (wether you realize it or not) included intellegence having been added to the "evolutionary development" of each item. However, the Darwinian scheme has no such provision.

What is this "intelligence" stuff that you mention? Other than ascribing your own human motives, how do you show that there is intention in anything? Perhaps your car's absolute purpose is to keep your vegetables cold and it is simply failing miserably at its divinely inspired destiny.

WTAF? The intention is not in the car - it's in the process. The process is human-designed, goal-oriented. Neither of which is Darwinian.

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Natural selection and engineering are not at all the same kind of process.

Using methods that are patterned in some way on an evolutionary model does not make them neo-Darwinian. The evolutionary engineering algorithms are like biological evolution, but they are not the same.

I develop software. Very little software today is written from scratch. We adapt, modify, reuse, and re-purpose chunks of code. This is similar in some ways to what evolution does - but it is not the same. And the major difference is that this evolution is guided by human goals, purpose, intelligence and creativity. Biological evolution is not.

To be neo-Darwinian, we would randomly modify and combine code and keep what does something useful. But we would never know what to expect and could not have any idea when we would get software that did what we needed or wanted. For that, the process must be guided - and that is as non-Darwinian as you can get.