I'm actually an agnostic, but question your conclusion that a designer wouldn't use the properties of pre-existing functional units to accomplish new designs. Given a set of materials, some of which have the ability to grow and develop, isn't that precisely how a designer would do it?
Trees are grown and modified to form lumber, which is assembled into houses. The same principle is used with aluminum window frames. Existing materials (alumina) are modified (in an electric furnace) and extruded. Houses have designers, yet are "grown" by people running around assembling pre-existing things using ad hoc assembly mechanisms (glues, cements, plastics, wood, etc.) rather than simply having the house being cast in place.
Sure you could cast a house, but that would be "creation" and not evolution. Similarly, an eye could have been grown from silica but vertebrates lack the silicon transport mechanisms of grasses. Had grasses evolved BEFORE the Paleozoic and not the Cenozoic period, it is possible that we would have had glass lenses and not aqueous gel eyes.
If you've ever sculpted, there are working properties of materials (especially clay) that have fluidity and continuous value functions over a certain range that needs to be carefully controlled.
Evolution and Intelligent Design are not incompatible. The latter is simply too speculative to be called science. I believe it is an okay proposition to debate, though, in a philosophy of science course. And if we ever get to build nanobots, it would be worthwhile to ask how this could be done intelligently. |
