Privileged Planet: designed to help us understand the world?

Jonathan Witt aruges that:

There is a factual error in the story’s headline and lead sentence. They suggest that the science documentary makes a case against biological evolution. In fact, the film doesn’t even touch on the subject.

The Privileged Planet focuses on cosmology and astronomy, and on Earth’s place in the universe. One could be a strict Darwinist and still agree with the argument in The Privileged Planet. In fact, that accurately describes at least two of the prominent scientists who endorsed the book upon which the documentary is based.

Dembski, reviewing the book on Amazon argues

The idea that the world and features of it are designed to help us understand the world and those features constitutes a remarkable insight. Gonzalez and Richards apply this insight mainly at the level of cosmology and astrophysics. But it promises to apply also in biology. Indeed, some preliminary work in the bioinformatics literature is suggesting that biological systems contain information of no functional use to the organism as such, but information that is useful to the investigator in examining the organism and trying to understand it.

I guess, pseudogenes can be considered as such. This of course gives a totally new meaning to ‘designed’: namely that evolutionary history is retained in the organisms. Oh wait…