Sorry if I return on a topic several times treated here. Imagine an extraterrestrial spaceship landing exactly before Mount Rushmore. An alien gets off the spaceship and sees the faces of the four US Presidents carved on the rock. The ET has of course a knowledge of the natural forces and the physical laws at least deep as humans (otherwise he couldn’t have designed his spaceship). While to recognize the patterns is easy for us because we see human faces everywhere, how can the alien infer design if he never saw a human being? In the following I will explain why, in my opinion, the ET concludes that the figuration he sees on the mountain cannot be due to long-term action of natural forces (erosion, weathering, fire, wind, rain, earth-quakes, geological movements, etc.)
Many centuries ago, in his “De Architectura”, Vitruvius said that any construction made according to the “rules of art” must meet three main specifications: “Venustas, Firmitas et Utilitas” = “Beauty, Strength and Functionality”. Note that, since in Latin “Utilitas” is not only functionality/utility but also the very reason of existence of a thing, the last term is related to the teleology of the construction (its final end). It is obvious that the Vitruvius’ statement holds also for the design of the living beings and the organization of their organisms, faces included. This is exactly what the biological realm shows us everywhere.
Of the three Vitruvian properties the alien before Mount Rushmore is facing only the first one, “beauty”. Beauty implies perfection, symmetry, order, proportions, smoothness, curvature, orthogonality, harmony, sleekness, etc. All these things are eminently shown on the faces magisterially made by the carvers of Mount Rushmore. Let’s analyze a little an human face with the help of the following figure. To simplify, the model will be two-dimensional. It is obvious that if the design inference is just true in my two-dimension simplified model, to greater reason it will be true for the real three-dimensional statues.
(1) There is a main central vertical axis of symmetry A, and secondary vertical axes b, b’, c, c’, d, d’ at its sides.
(2) There are three horizontal axes (eye, nose and mouth) orthogonal to the vertical axis. The vertical and horizontal axes form sort of scaffold for the overall drawing. The axes d, b, b’, d’ divide the eye line internal to the face in five equal parts (signed with “=” on the top).
(3) The right eye and the left eye are on the eye line and their positions are symmetrical relating to the A axis.
(4) The eyes are mirrored figures relating to the A axis.
(5) The nose has a symmetrical shape relating to the A axis, develops from the eye line to the nose line, and its base is large as the distance between the vertical axis b and b’.
(6) The mouth has a symmetrical shape relating to the A axis and is large as the distance between the vertical axis c and c’.
(7) All the elements of the face have shapes with many bends of different bending radius (curved shapes are more qualitative than square ones).
(8) All the face’s parts are made of finely levigated rock, of the same granularity.
(9) All the parts lay out on the same surface without discontinuity or screw dislocation.
(10) All parts are composed of harmonious alternation of “fill” and “void”.
(11) The ordered set of parts is centered inside an oval shape.
The key point is that all the above qualitative statements are topological specifications and are in an AND relation (logical conjunction). That is, the existence of the entire face implies that they hold together in the same time. This means that, if eventually a specification/element has a probability to occur p1 and another item has a probability to occur p2, the probability of both occurring in the same time is p1 multiplied p2.
The alien infers that something different from natural forces made the four faces mainly for three reasons:
(A) the experimental one: nowhere in the mountains of the Earth he was flying on (and likely the mountains in other planets) he saw the logical conjunction of the above complex specifications;
(B) the conceptual one: the natural forces, for what they are, are unable in principle to produce macroscopic configurations that meet all such properties in the same time;
(C) the probabilistic one: the probabilities to occur of the specifications/elements are just individually very small and the overall probability becomes even astronomically smaller when they are multiplied.
These three reasons together reinforce each other and give the alien the certainty that the top of Mt. Rushmore is an artifact. In a sense we could say that the tetrad of human faces, showing complexity and specifications, contain Complex Specified Information, of analogic/topological type. IMO this is a field of ID theory worth of further investigation, beyond the classic ID field of digital/combinatorial CSI.