Detecting design or intent in nature

[Esquilax]

Heywood's position has another flaw, which is more a problem with his argumentation and logic than his observations, but it's worth looking at because it scuttles his entire premise at the get go.

To put it simply, he's arbitrarily halting the procession of his argument at the point where it's most convenient for him, but where he doesn't have to deal with the consequences of bearing it out consistently. But we don't have to let him get away with this, and to hold him accountable we need ask only a simple question: why is he stopping his argument at intelligence?

If his argument goes that all the evolutionary systems he's seen for which the origins are known are the result of intelligence, therefore all evolutionary systems are the result of intelligence, Heywood is making an arbitrary decision to cut things off at generic intelligence, when that's not at all the full scope of what he's saying. In reality, not only are all the evolutionary systems with origins he knows of the result of intelligence, they're specifically the result of human intelligence. Coupled to this, he's also never seen an evolutionary system for which the origin was a non-human or human-created intelligence, so shouldn't the premises of his own argument eliminate that possibility from the running? The argument, when we subtract the hidden special pleading, actually should lead him to the conclusion that evolutionary systems are all the result of human intelligence, even the ones that came into being before humans evolved as a result of them, refuting and showing the clear inadequacies in what he's saying.

But we can take this one step further, since we've also never seen any non-human intelligences that are at the same level as ours, and thus according to Heywood's own logic he shouldn't be considering that they exist until we falsify that by producing a non-human intelligence of human sophistication or greater. If he's going to start bringing up dolphins or such, I can happily expand the criteria out so that he needs to include intelligences of non-Earth origins, since we've also never seen that.

Heywood's position, were he to hold it consistently- which would be a first, I admit- would preclude the very conclusions he comes to regarding evolutionary systems in this thread. It is thus self refuting, unless Heywood continues with his baseless special pleading.

It wouldn't surprise me at all if that's what he opts to do.