God, Cows, And Intelligent Design

My recent work with 3D printing has had me thinking about the arguments between Evolution and Intelligent design. Leaving aside Science and Rational Thought for a moment and putting equal weight on the concepts of Evolution and Intelligent design I say, hey, let's take a look at a recent 3D model I have been designing (I claim intelligently).

I have been working on this project for years. Much like God let the universe swirl around for a few billion years before he got to work on 'Life'.  My project is to put programmable flashing Christmas lights on my G-Scale home train. So it would go around the tree and blink pretty programmable patterns. The problem is hooking the lights to the trains in a way that doesn't look all schlocky. I had tried with wood. Ugly. And didn't work. The lights kept falling off. And I need a way to hide the solder joints. Then I got a 3D printer. It was a great start. But it was sort of small. Two many pieces had to be hooked together. And it still didn't look so hot. Then I got a bigger printer. And I had this idea of how to put the light holders around the top of the car as a sort of raised roof technology. It would look like an original part of the car. And then I started to design that.

I made a lot of scrap plastic on the way.

Each time I printed it I would try something different and better and my design sort of.... evolved... toward the right design. It was intelligent design, but with evolution !!

Perhaps it was like that with God and Cows. God was out creating Cows and he would print one up (using a previous cow's self replicating mechanism) with a few minor tweaks from the last print. He would take a look at it, see how it mooed, see if there were any gaps he didn't expect and that everything fit nicely. Perhaps he would notice something that would be better in a slightly different shade of brown. So he would tweak the gcode (called DNA in COWS) and have the latest sample print him the next generation. And so forth. Eventually he had something that he thought made a really good cow and he was pleased with himself. Then he sat back and thought, "How in the hell am I ever going to get programmable Christmas Lights hung on this puppy?".


get intelligent design guys and evolution guys together using 3D printing.

Gee, that isn't quite what I had in mind when I thought "Cow".