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You would identify groups of designed lifeforms by nothing that they share the same telltales (not yet) discovered in groups of objects known to be designed. Basically the exact same process by which we identify groups of evolved lifeforms.Since its purpose isn't to reveal a designer, this is not a terribly valid point.To the first question, it hasn't been determined. We'd have to look at a lot of designed objects and see if there was anything characteristic about having been designed. To the second question, assuming we've accomplished the first task, a non-designed object would be one that did not have any of the telltale characteristics of design.Currently: Intelligent Design isn't science. It isn't falsifiable. It is impossible to say "This organism is designed" and "This organism is not designed"... so it's a bit premature to ask why one is and one isn't when you can't even tell which is which.

Also, the mechanism question is for later work... it's not actually relevant to whether or not there is design evident. It's kind of like the way you can look at genetic sequence data and trace out how the similarity shows that two organisms are related (dolphins and slime mold, for example), but have no mechanism for how a common ancestor can give rise to the two different organisms.It can certainly be done. I agree that it probably wouldn't succeed (both in establishing a rigorous standard of evidence for design and in identifying evidence for design in living things). However, it has not been attempted, to my knowledge. In part because real scientists dismiss ID as the next big steaming pile from the Creationists, and the Creationists know they have a good track record by not actually turning their doctrine into falsifiable science.What being pointed out is that even concious design processes often have evolutionary features. Inventions are not so much created of whole cloth as made from incremental improvements (and combinations) of existing technologies. Bell Labs could have come up with psychoacoustic audio compression (E.G. MP3) and P2P file sharing back in the 1950s... but what would have been the point without the technology (fast personal computers, widespread internet access) to make it useful?
We see the same sorts of things in the fossil record. What good is an oxygen consuming metabolism if you evolve it before photosynthetic algae fill the atmosphere with it?

Basically, how do you differentiate between a evolutionary design process and real no shit evolution?That page is a call for theosophy. Since the identity of the design is irrelevant, a page saying "Ah-ha! Why would your omnibenevolent god design THESE?" has no application. You might as well ask why we have QWERTY keyboards. They made good design sense at the time...On the other hand, if we suppose for a moment that a standard of evidence is established for design, and that living things do show evidence of design... Then the pure evolution explanation, though simpler, is incomplete... so Occam's Razor cuts both ways.You can't point to something and say it was not designed either, at that point. There is no standard of evidence for design. There is no rigorous test for design... jsut a fuzzy "i know it when i see it." This does not necessarily have to be the case.Well, no, if the eye is not designed, then the eye does not look designed. To claim the eye looks like it's designed, but assert that it is not, is merely continued illustration for the fuzzy state of how "design" is identified.Design wouldn't be assumed. It would be no different from noting that living things show evidence of having evolved... and leaving the conclusion open. If living things show evidence of being designed... what does that mean?A design process that mimics descent with modification. Where subsequent technologies and innovations are based on the success of prior invention.
There isn't any negative evidence against ID either... because there can be no evidence either way. ID is not science and is not falsifiable. It does not necessarily have to be that way."Evolution" as a scientific term has its roots in chemistry, not biology... and before that is used in alchemy. Of course they don't mean the same thing when they say "hydrogen gas evolves" in a reaction... but biology doesn't have a monopoly on the term. Evolutionary algorithms are applied all sorts of places outside living systems.The pattern of genetic similarity present in all life on earth that allows a so-called family tree to be constructed showing how we all share common ancestry.It would depend on what the evidence shows. If evidence for design only appears at the lowest levels,(I.E highly conserved "lynchpins of life" style proteins) then abiogenesis would be the target. If it shows up at higher levels of classification, then the case would be different. There is no evidence, so there's nothing really to be said about how it might impact evolution.I agree with you that the current state of ID is that it's the newest "thin end of the wedge" brought to us by Creationists. I also think that if someone did bother to try being scientific about "design theory" they'd either never succeed in developing a standard of evidence or if they succeeded there, would show that living things are not designed. I don't agree that "design theory" is inherently unscientific.Exactly the same way they did it with evolution. Look at a bunch of designed things and figure out what charactersitics they have in common... and then look for those characteristics in other things. Then you say "Ah-ha, this thing has characterstics of design".If you have virus code that propagates by infecting a legitimate executable, so that the virus code is only executed with the host program, then you've got a 1-to-1 analogy to retroviral infection and reproduction. The virus example was brought up to give an example of designed technology that DOES reproduce. Hell, there are viruses designed to mutate and avoid anti-virus software. It may not be a perfect analogy, but it's pretty damn good. Incidentally, life sustaining planets don't give birth to more life sustaining planets... so I'm not sure what the point of your comment about computers was supposed to be.The process is the same where we take known (or simulated) examples of evolution to develop and idea of what evolution looks like. So when we see the same patterns of similarity, we can assume those patterns also are the result of evolution. It's still an assumption. To establish an equivalent standard of evidence for design, we have to begin with designed objects, see if we can rigorously define what design looks like, and then see if we can find it elsewhere (I.E. in living things).It has yet to be established what "design clues" we can look for. At this point, we're only concerned with the design... not how, or who, or what did the designing."Design theory" is not science. It has not been expressed in a sufficiently rigorous manner so that it actually makes claims that can be validated. It is not falsifiable. Evolution, OTOH, is falsifiable... it simply hasn't been falsified yet- just like all good theories.I'm not sure that I have called ID scientific. I have said there's nothing preventing ID from becoming scientific... other than the prejudice of scientists and the religious agenda of the current batch of ID proponents. If someone did seek to treat ID to a proper scientific methodology, whatever impact it had on evolution would be secondary.Because I don't believe living things are designed? The best means to stop science from progressing is to stop doing science. ID could be treated scientifically, and it would probably disproven (IMO). Though it's pretty much a waste of time, that would still be good science. A developed body of evidence conclusively proving that living things are not designed? That's useful. To leave things in their current semantic state? That's useful to the creationists.Wherever it takes us. It would probably spawn a number of applications in the quality assurance industry. It would tend to blur the line between engineering (which is practical) and designing (which is currently fairly artistic) by providing a solid structure for design. Alternatively, design would be used to refer to aesthetics, and the rest would all get included under engineering. It really depends on how useful design theory turns out to be.It formalizes the design process. Ergo, people can then take the formal design process, look at their particular in-house design departments, and streamline their operations. As it is, it's viewed as a creative/artistic process... so an amount of screwing around is accepted.Intelligent design is not science? Yes. Intelligent design cannot be science? No.Well, it's not like Darwin devoted all of his time to evolutionary biology, or Newton spent all his time working on calculus (Newton wasted a fair amount of time on Alchemy, come to think of it). Even so, it's a slow process, and the current batch of proponents are probably more interested in sounding convincing than in actually saying anything important... it's an age old tactic of creationists.Ever heard the phrase "Don't re-invent the wheel"? Designers commonly adapt proven concepts to the current task, rather than design something from scratch. Whether this is a valid comparison has not been shown, of course, so I'm just talking out my ass.

To lapse back into computer analogies... Library functions spring to mind. Ideally, you can replace a standard library with another, and all your programs will function the same as they did before, even if the specific algorithms the new library uses are different from the original library's.

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Simple Machines in Higher Dimensions