Are human gears made from biological materials like planthopper legs? Do human gears grow from single cells like planthopper legs do? Do human gears vanish after a few weeks like the bumps on juvenile planthoppers do?
Sorry but your superficial similarity “looks designed to me!” argument will always be a loser.
No. A structure need not be contingent to be specified, as your snow cristal example show.
Then by your definition specification is not an indication of design. Thanks for refuting your own argument. 
Not contingent on human designed gears, therefore no design inference is warranted in this case. Right Giltil?
You are missing the mark here for in this conversation, I am not trying to show that CSI is a hallmark of design ( although I think it is) but simply to explain what is a specification.
No, that doesn’t help for as a matter of fact, the gears of the planthopper do conform to an independently given pattern, I.e., match a specification.
You made up your own hopelessly broad and subjective definition of “specified” as “one thing which looks like another thing”. Do you now agree by your definition “specified” does not indicate design unless you can establish a contingency between the two similar appearing things?
Sorry but I really don’t understand what you mean here. Could you elaborate?
Same thing you meant here.
Can’t have it both ways Gil.
I think you need to understand that just putting words together in more or less grammatically correct sentences is not sufficient to make a sound argument.
Someone who believe the gears of the planthopper are made out of peanut butter could just as easily write: “The gears of the plant hopper do conform to what be expected of something made out of peanut butter i.e. being composed of the same ingredients that are found in peanut butter.”
That does not make the claim true. Do you understand why?
I stand by my statement of the common usage of specification, which does assume a logical or temporal prior requirement for conformity. The definition you present is consistent with that meaning. I have worked with hundreds of IEEE, API, ISA, CSA, UL, ANSI, ASTM, CE, and other specifications. The wiring in your house is specified by code. Specification is a familiar concept, and outside of ID, nobody has any problem mixing it up with some strange notion of similarity.
ID would not be indulging in such convolution were there not some impetus, and that is the pervasive problem ID has with demonstrating design in nature. If somebody asks me for the design of my house, I can produce blueprints for the house. Independence, contingency, intentionality, it is all there by means of documentation everybody is familiar with. For all the purported ID in nature, no such analogs exist. All this contortion to somehow infer specification and contingency, and to draw an equivalency to such blueprints in the complete absence such, is invented by ID as an effort to plug this yawning gap.
Not so. I contend that by way of the word game surrounding independent specification, ID really is saying “I assume design therefore I have demonstrated design”. As I stated in a post above:
But the need for specification is only implied from the presumption of design, in fact, specification is just design objectives and is inherent in the concept of design. Thus, the argument boils down to “this feature of biology has evidence of design because it has evidence of design” For all the voluminous verbiage ID has produced concerning specification, it remains a semantic hall of mirrors.
Not so.
An act of identifying something precisely
If you use this definition for specification, you immediately see that specification has nothing to do with design objectives.
Do you still agree design inference is not warranted by specification unless there is contingency too?
By what, then, do you refer to design objectives?
An act of identifying something precisely, as you are using it, looks a lot like “criteria” to me.
But if there is one thing by definition, it is that arguments over definitions cannot be resolved. I will just leave it that I do not salute this flag and move on.
In any event, let us say that the precise specification for gear is a “set of toothed wheels that work together”. We will include cams as well as wheels so the planthopper fits in. Note that “human designed” is not part of the definition, criteria, or if you please, specification. There are gears in a hand egg beater, there are gears in a planthopper, and by that criteria they belong in the set of geared objects. But while the eggbeater would have been produced from a shop drawing, none at all exist for planthoppers.
Absolutely
I would like to propose you a thought experiment. Imagine living in Paris at the time of the French Revolution, the day before the execution of Louis XVI. You get up the next morning, the weather is fine, you go to the Place de la Concorde, the place of the execution, and suddenly, in the sky above the place, you see light clouds forming, with great clarity, the following sequence of letters: Renounce the execution of your king Louis XVI, under penalty of punishment, for he is innocent
In that situation, wouldn’t you be surprised? If yes, why? And wouldn’t you infer design? If yes, why?
So you don’t know what a specification is.
Well, you’re probably right here, there is probably no specification for human intelligence. So my idea that specification is necessary for something to be remarkable is wrong. It is sufficient but not necessary. More generally, I would now say that something is remarkable if its occurrence is unexpected.
So human intelligence, which isn’t unexpected, is not remarkable.
Would you like to provide a third means of determining whether human intelligence is remarkable, or should we just skip forward to:
So human intelligence, which isn’t [whatever @Giltil comes up with next], is not remarkable
and save time?
In the meantime I’m still waiting to hear from Gil if a cloud that looks like Great Britain has CSI and triggers a Design Inference, and if not, why not.
