Discovery has produced a nice promo video for my book In the Beginning and Other Essays on Intelligent Design. The video is of course not designed to make a serious argument for ID, but just to pique the viewer’s interest enough to consider buying the book, and that is of course my reason for posting it here.
If you want to discuss the point made in the video, I hope you will first read the Postscript to my 1985 Springer-Verlag book (now Chapter 4 in the new book), where the point is made in more detail, or my 2000 Mathematical Intelligencer article which is now Chapter 3.
Actually, the similarities between the development of software and the development of life go beyond the points made in the above-linked video and articles. In Chapter 5 I briefly discuss evolutionary “convergence”, where similar designs arise independently in distant branches of the evolutionary tree—this phenomenon is often seen in software development, and points to common design rather than common descent. (Though, of course, common descent does explain many similarities, between software versions as well as between species.) Also, in Chapter 9 I have a short discussion of “front-loading”, where our “programmer” has apparently embedded genetic code in primitive animals, in anticipation of a need for it in later “versions”!
The Springer-Verlag editor, by the way, told me he first objected to the inclusion of the “Postscript” in my 1985 book, but consulted with someone else who convinced him it was ok. So does that make this one of the first “peer-reviewed” articles on ID? 🙂 (Despite the last sentence, it is clearly a pro-ID article.)