Why birds do not fall while sleeping

When I was younger, I was fascinated by evolution, especially the intricacies of how things just work. This fascination also explains why many people believe in the intelligent design theory.

However, witnessing the rapid evolution of AI with just a few hundred GPUs, enough data, and power, I no longer wonder what a billion years of feedback loops and randomness can achieve.

The fascination with “intelligent design” is cherry-picking. The is no shortage of “unintelligent design” in the natural world.

Take humans, for example. You can block your trachea and die through the simple act of eating. An intelligent (and omniscient) designer could have avoided that by better designing our overall our overall structure.

Or take the fact or ear bones are modified jaw bones. Or if you believe in intelligent design, ask why our intelligent designer thought it wise to link our jaw to our ears so that it’s hard to hear things when you’re chewing.

That's pretty weak argument against intelligent design.

1. The designer does not have to be "omniscient" only intelligent. Some people believe in it's omniscience but I don't think it's a requirement.

2. How do you know that our trachea is not an optimal design when you take into account all the tradeoffs?

3. You're surrounded by items created by intelligent design (us) and all of them have flaws, reused parts and tend to break. Obviously you wouldn't argue based on this that they weren't designed by intelligent beings.

> How do you know that our trachea is not an optimal design when you take into account all the tradeoffs?

Because if we were designed from scratch we could have been designed in any optimal shape or form.

> You're surrounded by items created by intelligent design (us) and all of them have flaws, reused parts and tend to break. Obviously you wouldn't argue based on this that they weren't designed by intelligent beings.

Show me an intelligent designer who can literally design the universe, but is still not intelligent enough to avoid these flaws even we can recognize. I don’t think we are intelligent enough to design a completely novel life form, let alone as many as exist on earth in all their forms.

This is all beside the point that there’s no evidence of any kind for intelligent design, only supposition based on nothing more than intuition and feelings.

> Because if we were designed from scratch we could have been designed in any optimal shape or form

Only if you assume the designer had infinite time, knowledge and resources. But life on Earth did not have to be created by some omnipotent god who created universe. It only requires more advanced intelligence than us. Although theoretically even we may reach this level in the future with advances in bioengineering.

> This is all beside the point that there’s no evidence of any kind for intelligent design, only supposition based on nothing more than intuition and feelings.

Depending on what you consider "evidence" the same sentence could be said for evolution. There are many arguments in favor of intelligent design like for example no viable mechanism of randomly evolving genetic code. I wouldn't say it's as open and shut case as you make it seem.