Detecting design or intent in nature

[JuliaL]

I have always maintained that evolutionary systems required intellect, either as a designer or as a component. I have never claimed that all evolutionary systems were intentionally created by intellects.

Tribes is not an example of an evolutionary system that did not require intellect to be implemented. It may not have been intentional but it certainly needed intellect.

I agree that formation of completely independent self replicating systems is uncommon in the observed universe. But some of that rarity is likely due to our limited horizon in both time and space.

From another thread http://atheistforums.org/thread-21222-pa...biogenesis a link to a report:

Here is an interesting article.



I would like to find some updates on this. Self-replicating RNA that mutates.

Now scientists have created something in the lab that is tantalizingly close to what might have happened. It's not life, they stress, but it certainly gives the science community a whole new data set to chew on.
The researchers, at the Scripps Research Institute, created molecules that self-replicate and even evolve and compete to win or lose.

To satisfy you, to what degree does an intellect have to not participate? In the above, the experimenters set up the apparatus and the RNA replicator was produced. This plausibly shows how a replicating system could be produced without intellect (as designer or component) given a coincidence of events equivalent to the lab setup. To insist that the event must be fully unaffected by the experimenter/observer before it can qualify as arising without intellect is too much like Ken Ham's "Were you there?" It can't be done. If the experiment must be fully independent of the experimenter, it cannot be observed (per Heisenberg.)
Prior to 1828 it was thought that organic chemicals couldn't be produced without the agency of a living organism.