Gollum... no GOLEM!!!

William Dembski at uncommondescent writes (Jan 17th, 2007):

Does the following point up disconfirming evidence against the creative power of unguided evolutionary processes? What has become of this project to vindicate standard evolutionary theory?

• The golem@Home project has concluded. After accumulating several Million CPU hours on this project and reviewing many evolved creatures we have concluded that merely more CPU is not sufficient to evolve complexity: The evolutionary process appears to be hitting a complexity barrier that is not traversable using direct mutation-selection processes, due to the exponential nature of the problem.
  

Well, from what I have seen in ID writings, evolutionary algorithms all fail to mimic Darwinian processes for some reason or other. One common objection is that these programs strive for a preset goal - i.e. they have teleology. Teleology, they claim, is what an intelligent designer has and evolution doesn't, so all these algorithms really show is that intelligent designers are able to design the algorithms that lead to the solution - i.e. the programs really support ID.

Golem basically works as follows:

The organism will attempt to move across an infinite plain, and its fitness is determined by how successful it is at locomotion. The construction details are then stored, and another creature allowed to develop. The fitter "robots" can pass their "genes" on to the next generation, and as time passes, the more successful combinations are permitted to survive.

Golum's teleologic goal is thus to be able to move better than before. The success of this approach would thus (by ID standards) have been support for ID and this is what IDists would have claimed had the program been successful. But the program failed and thus the project really points up disconfirming evidence against the creative power of intelligently designed processes.

If IDists were consistent, they should read the above as:

The golem@Home project has concluded. After accumulating several Million CPU hours on this project and reviewing many intelligently designed creatures we have concluded that merely more CPU is not sufficient to intelligently design complexity: The intelligently designed process appears to be hitting a complexity barrier that is not traversable using direct intelligently designed mutation-selection processes, due to the exponential nature of the problem.

Well, this is what IDists themselves should be saying.