Detecting design or intent in nature

[Jenny A]

You are conflating the products of an evolutionary system with the system itself.

Quite right, I was refuting seeing design in each animal of nature, not seeing design in the evolutionary mechanism.

But no, I don't see that natural selection was designed either. For one thing, it isn't a system. There is no more to natural selection than this: those organisms which are most often successful in replicating themselves will be most common in the next generation. It's a mathematical truism not a design any more than 1 + 1 = 2 is a design.

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?

Natural selection is not a system at all. It's just a simple rule. It applies in simulated worlds too. What is designed in simulations is not the rule of natural selection but the environment in which it takes place, the mechanism by which the simulated organisms change and in your simulation the selection of a single criteria for determining which organisms will reproduce. But evolution would take place in any environment where organisms can reproduce.