Re the Dennis Noble article; the journalist's critique is pretty weak imo. "Noble is entitled to his view that you can have purpose and top-down goal-oriented functions in organisms without any intelligent design. But a lot of people in the scientific community — including both ID proponents and evolutionists of various stripes — are going to find this a bit difficult to accept."
It seems really obvious to me that 'goal-oriented functions' emerge *mostly* without intelligent design. Slime molds can solve the traveling salesman problem through distributed computation corresponding to a goal like 'find efficient paths to food' without any central planner. Ant colonies have clear short term goals that emerge in problem solving (check this out https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x85O9tRgyeQ). Who is the intelligent designer in either of these cases? It feels like the people who object don't fully grok a non-reductive worldview
Re the Dennis Noble article; the journalist's critique is pretty weak imo. "Noble is entitled to his view that you can have purpose and top-down goal-oriented functions in organisms without any intelligent design. But a lot of people in the scientific community — including both ID proponents and evolutionists of various stripes — are going to find this a bit difficult to accept."
It seems really obvious to me that 'goal-oriented functions' emerge *mostly* without intelligent design. Slime molds can solve the traveling salesman problem through distributed computation corresponding to a goal like 'find efficient paths to food' without any central planner. Ant colonies have clear short term goals that emerge in problem solving (check this out https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x85O9tRgyeQ). Who is the intelligent designer in either of these cases? It feels like the people who object don't fully grok a non-reductive worldview