I've blogged about the amazing LED lights in butterflies before, but now here's an article in IEEE Spectrum that prominently bears the words, "intelligent design," in the caption of a picture of these butterflies (HT: ID Update). IEEE Spectrum is a magazine for engineers. Generally, it seems that engineers are more keen at noticing design, since they are designers themselves.
Here's a clip of the article:
The article begins by telling us about an intelligent MIT engineer who designs an efficient LED by carefully creating a particular structure. Later, there is the discovery that a butterfly has an efficient LED that posesses the same exact structure. This isomorphism between the structure that the engineer builds and the structure that is later found in the butterfly is very strong positive proof for intelligent design. We can rationally infer that this LED structure found in butterflies was designed...unless we rule out design a priori.
If one works within the cohesive framework of intelligent design, one could look around at nature and potentially find useful designs which could be copied for technological purposes. This scientific field is known as biomimicry (see here and here). In the article, Vukusic suggests that they could have saved a lot of time if they had found and copied the LED in this butterfly.
I think that intelligent design can be used as an overarching framework to achieve new scientific breakthroughs and innovations in technology. Let's not limit science from making these discoveries.
Note: The links to the article now require login.
Here's a clip of the article:
Designing LEDs, Erchak solved essentially the same problem by placing a distributed Bragg reflector beneath his LED and a photonic crystal above it—just as nature has done for P. nireus. "Who knows how much time could have been saved if we'd seen this butterfly structure 10 years ago," says Vukusic.Given that many complex technologies (like these LED lights) are embedded in nature, which inference about their origins is more valid? Did these technologies arise stochastically from an unguided evolutionary process with no goal in mind? Or were they artifacts of design due to an intelligent agency?
The article begins by telling us about an intelligent MIT engineer who designs an efficient LED by carefully creating a particular structure. Later, there is the discovery that a butterfly has an efficient LED that posesses the same exact structure. This isomorphism between the structure that the engineer builds and the structure that is later found in the butterfly is very strong positive proof for intelligent design. We can rationally infer that this LED structure found in butterflies was designed...unless we rule out design a priori.
If one works within the cohesive framework of intelligent design, one could look around at nature and potentially find useful designs which could be copied for technological purposes. This scientific field is known as biomimicry (see here and here). In the article, Vukusic suggests that they could have saved a lot of time if they had found and copied the LED in this butterfly.
I think that intelligent design can be used as an overarching framework to achieve new scientific breakthroughs and innovations in technology. Let's not limit science from making these discoveries.
Note: The links to the article now require login.
Doctor Logic said... 
