Not "made by", but "purposed by."
The ID'ers at Uncommon Descent are discussing an initially interesting question, but as usual they've zoomed away into a stratospheric level of academic abstraction that loses the meaning. Question: Did God leave a message in life, something akin to "Made By God"? If so, how and where would we look for it, and how would we decode it?

Seems to me that the focus on manufacturing is misplaced. Life is purpose. Everything in the genome is expressed as a purpose or function or verb, with structures and nouns being incidental and mutable ways of reaching the purpose.

Illustration in yesterday's local news. Homeowners at Newman Lake have been surprised by jellyfish in the lake. Apparently freshwater jellyfish are fairly common, but hadn't been 'seeded' in this particular lake until recently.

KREM ran a feature, including a NEAT piece of underwater video.

Note the moment around 1:09 where the jellyfish elongates into a fish-like shape to swim horizontally.

Are radial and bilateral really distinct types of structure, or are they just purposes? Radial when you need to be sessile, bilateral when you need to move forward? Jellyfish says yes to purpose.

Now back to the "Made By God" question. It seems more likely that God gives us messages about purpose, using the language of living structures to form the instructions.

One of God's deepest and most pervasive purposes is DECENTRALIZATION. Subsidiarity. Modules operating within their own walls, interacting with other modules in a STRICTLY limited way. The jellyfish shows us how this works. It has no brain or central ganglion, and some of its parts are essentially separate organisms. Yet it flaps and swims in perfect rhythm and synchrony. No conductor needed for a properly-trained ensemble.

Recently we've been violating this rule in all sorts of ways. God is attempting to give us negative feedback in a language that we can understand. Ebola is a disease that functions by breaking cell boundaries. Why do we have a spreading epidemic of Ebola? Because we've broken too many other boundaries. Porous borders between countries ---> porous borders between cells.

Labels: Grand Blueprint

  ¶ 3:48 AM