Moving from there to convincing isn’t easy but it is easier since your not starting from a defensive position.

Besides the assumed static nature or meaning I think evolution is hard to grok due to humans instinct to look for a direct causitive agent. The same instinct that makes us assume a supernatural agent behind slamming windows and weather and illnesses.

Some evolutionary changes are easy to fathom as a result of natural selection, and others are much more abstruse. Most can quicky envision what would cause a girrafes neck to be chosen for but an eye or the heart?

I’ve been reading George Lakoff recently, and he has a lot to say about the use of words and how they relate to “frames.” (see e.g. Chapter 3 of his book Thinking Points) In Lakoff’s view, mere word manipulation modifies the “surface frames” evoked in conversation, but if those surface meanings do no resonate with deeper conceptual systems, they will be rejected. He advocates instead the slow construction of “deep frames”, which are much more about the story and deep assumptions behind the words. Your story of “designed by natural selection” touches on this deeper sense; it might be effective in making evolution acceptable to creationists — but I suspect not.

I say this because my understanding of the rejection of evolution revolves around something embedded extremely deeply in the cognitive structures of most humans: the notion of “meaning” as an external construct, rather than a projection upon the world. This is where the idea that things have “purpose” comes from. It’s going to be very hard to change this idea, because it’s psychologically frightening to most people to believe that “meaning”, like “identity”, could be so malleable.

I still worry that using the word design in this way would be a victory for the creationists, because it would reinforce the sentiment that anything complex must have intent behind it. My guess is that when people are in awe of the complexity of the eye or something similar they’re thinking a few things, including This can’t happen by accident, and perhaps This must have been designed by some intelligent force. Appropriating the term ‘design’ may help with the first point, that these things aren’t accidental, but I think it would just help the creationists on the second point, by allowing them to mislead people by saying, “See, even the scientists agree that it was designed, and if there’s a design there must be a designer!” Call it empowering the term for them if you will, but it just seems like a losing fight to try to appropriate the word ‘design.’

What we need to do is find a way to break the false dichotomy of design vs. accident in the minds of the public, to show that there is an alternative between random chance and intelligent design. I just had the thought that the term ‘design without a designer’ could be a catchy way to emphasize the point, but that risks sounding both smug and defensive at the same time.

You propose some good analogies which could be useful for describing natural selection. However, those don’t get past the difficulty most people have with the “beauty of the eye” etc.

I mean I understand how the eye came to be and how it’s not “irreducibly complex” but it’s difficult for most to see past that (all puns intended). To most the eye is an engineered marvel. When someone says to them looks at the beautiful design of the eye they immediately agree that the eye is beautiful and feels designed.

Presented with this most evolutionary argument start with the negative “no it’s not designed.” And when people are innately viewing it as designed this is not a statement that will win them over. They can sense in their guts that it is designed and your statement just doesn’t ring true and thus everything else after that also rings false.

By instead approaching the issue by saying yes it is designed but designed by natural selection, you are not not directly challenging what they can see with their two eyes.

Also again as I have already stated by being afraid to use the word design you are empowering it for them. And actually I probably have commented that a sunset was nicely designed — but that’s because I’m an artist.

Note from the blog owner:
This was an advert for a creationist book entitled Quest For Right. If it had been your normal rambling creationist comment, I would have left it; however it was an ad copied word for word from their site. Thus, it was no better than spam.

I’m not so sure this is a good idea – it seems to me to have a fairly poor cost/benefit ratio. It would be both difficult and potentially dangerous to repurpose the word ‘design’ in this way. Difficult because this use would be directly contrary to the present use, in which ‘design’ does imply a designer (in the present use, wouldn’t it be absurd to refer to a nicely designed sunset?). Potentially dangerous for reasons similar to those you mention by PZ Myer – that it runs the risk of making it look like a victory for creationists, and that it would confuse people about the very issue of whether complex systems require a designer.

And I think the potential rewards are relatively slight. So we claim the word ‘design’ – so what? I don’t think people are so attached to the word that using it to describe unintended natural processes would win any converts to naturalism. And it isn’t like the word is being used as a slur that must be reclaimed; it’s being used as an accurate description of an inaccurate idea about how natural processes work. It’s the idea that’s objectionable, not the word, and appropriating the word doesn’t seem like it would do all that much good while running a high risk.

But I do agree that we need to do a better job in public discourse of showing that natural processes can create amazingly complex patterns from relatively simple rules. Maybe a phrase like ‘emerging complexity’ or something like that. Another way of doing it is to draw attention to natural selection and related processes in everyday contexts more familiar to people than the creation of new species. For example, the way that basketball players tend to be tall because the rules of basketball select for tall people, or the way that there tends to be more debris on the highway between lanes rather than in them because all things being equal junk in a lane is more likely to be kicked up by a car and moved than junk between lanes.