Detecting design or intent in nature

[Chas]

But evolutionarily designed things do have left overs no designer would even have considered. Your body is covered in little tiny tiny hairs that serve little purpose today. Certainly, they don't keep you warm. And they probably aren't decorative. Your spine is a modification of a design meant for walking on all fours, and as a design it frankly sucks. It would have been better to start from scratch just as replacing a horse with an engine is better than trying to make a mechanized horse to do the job. Whales and dolphins swim by pumping up and down, because that's home mammal spines work. But fish move much more efficiently. Why? Evolution working on what is, not designing from scratch. The hallmarks of adaptation and design are quite different.

You are conflating the products of an evolutionary system with the system itself. Do you remember the video I posted in another thread where virtual beings were evolved in a computer simulated world? The features of those beings were not directly designed...but the system which evolved them certainly was.

Can you point to an evolutionary system which you know for certain doesn't require an intellect to come into existence or to be a substantial part of it? I cannot. It seems every evolutionary system....including memetic ones, required either intellect to design them or intellect to be the selective mechanism in them. Why then should I make a special case for the evolutionary system which produced me and believe that somehow it is different and didn't need an intellect to design it or be substantially involved in the selection mechanism?

There is no reason to believe that biological evolution requires an intellect.

And there is most certainly no evidence that it does.