Mimicing something doesn’t make it the same thing. Anyway, even if people were able to create a perfect mimicry of evolution and do things with it, that would have no bearing on where evolution came from, how it began, etc.
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But if mimicking evolution is widely considered “artificial intelligence,” then wouldn’t that indicate that evolution is an intelligent process?
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The short answer is I don’t think we can learn anything by playing with words and their various meanings like that. You keep trying to take these things people have done and assign qualities to evolution on that basis. Evolution is what it is. You want to demonstrate there is an intelligence behind it. It would be good to demonstrate that the intelligence exists; no one has done so to my knowledge. Or you could show how the intelligence manifests in evolution. What would you say is the best item of evidence for it? I think evolution can be easily explained without intelligence as an iterative chemical process that winds away over time of its own accord. To my way of thinking there are much harder questions, for example, why is any matter here at all? The evolution of life in its current form on earth from existing chemical compounds seems trivial next to that.
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Whoa.
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That one might work as a koan.
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It doesn’t matter!
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I’m probably too old to be beginning a study of science (about which I’m very ignorant), but anyway, I thought maybe matter was a form of–or was a number of forms of–energy, and that if the forms were to be explained, they might have to be explained by the intellectual kinfolk of this guy (about whom I also know nothing):
Of course, that wouldn’t answer your question, but it might help somehow.
A quick look on the internet shows that “energy is a property of matter”. Things get a lot more confusing with that with quantum mechanics. The basic question though is, why is anything here at all? (That question would also apply to a creator who made the other stuff, naturally). That was more what I meant than matter itself, though it is an interesting form for less easily explainable stuff to take. These things seem like they will always be tough to answer.
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Why does it have to be intelligent? If the goal is survival and reproduction and you define intelligence by brain size, our brains seems like a huge waste of resources. A ultra resistant fungus or virus seems much more promising.
I’m still trying to understand the arguments here, but that seems to support OO’s point.
I agree our brains are not that efficient (the cells that process eyesight are at the back of our head, instead of right behind them). But something doesn’t have to be perfectly efficient to be intelligent.
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But then keep repeating, no? Perhaps we shouldn’t assume we’re the endpoint.
Also, someone said above that evolution has produced intelligent life only once, but I don’t think we know that. There’s been plenty of time for whole civilizations of intelligent creatures to rise and fall and be completely washed away, even just here on Earth.
Anyway, the argument that evolution must be designed to produce us seems a bit like the fine-tuned universe argument: that the universal constants were chosen to make us possible. It can’t be disproven, but I like the multiverse theory better: We’re looking at these apparently unlikely systems because they’re the ones that produced us, but we can’t see all the ones that didn’t.
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The multiverse theory is basically a religion. You’re just using another realm to explain this one.
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Well, yes, but no more so than the alternatives.
Well there is nothing known in human experience in which intelligence was created from no intelligence, that’s why people assign intelligence behind it, and mimic the process to create advanced technology.
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If repetition is involved in evolution, wouldn’t the evolutionary part of the repetition be analogous to the “repetitions” in the telephone game, since evolution involves change, and perfect repetition or iteration wouldn’t seem to result in any change? And since these things occurred over millions, even billions of years, wouldn’t it be quite a challenge (to put it conservatively) to track all the “repetitions” in this particular telephone game?
I’m sure you know that Darwin used the term natural selection to denote the mechanism (or if it’s not a mechanism, then the whatchamacallit) by which evolution occurred. Selecting, selection, etc., were terms already used in the art of breeding, before the publication of On the Origin of Species, as you can see in these examples from 1839 and 1847. So in using that phrase, Darwin appears to be likening nature to a breeder, or in other words, he appears to be personifying nature. Now, I am confident that he used that term for convenience’ sake, and did not mean it literally, but his use of it shows how hard it is escape the idea of design when explaining these kinds of things.
I’m not making the argument that there’s a design (not at this time, anyway–I don’t know enough to argue that issue one way or the other on my own hook, and I probably never will). I’m just saying that if one feels a need (as Darwin did) to explain a natural event by depicting nature as a breeder, then one shouldn’t be surprised if other people end up having notions that are at variance with the idea that there’s no thinking, designing entity behind it all.
Peace 
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Can you clarify what you mean here? It just seems like another word game.
How are you defining “intelligence” here? The only two forms I see are human (or human/animal) intelligence and AI, so I don’t get what you mean with your first sentence. But the former would seem to be a process in which “intelligence was created from no intelligence”, unless you’ve already decided to attribute human intelligence to a higher being, in which case the whole argument seems circular.
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That’s the issue in dispute here. Do you have any other examples?
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There are various survival mechanisms used by various organisms which fit into different niches- elephants’ trunks, beetles’ carapaces, amoebas’ pseudopods, clinging vines- no one size fits all- it’s like asking why isn’t every car a model-T Ford?
Other examples of what? I listed the only two broad categories of intelligence I could think of - natural and artificial, which seem to cover everything. What do you mean, exactly?