One of the central ideas behind intelligent design is that by observing something in nature, we can tell if it was designed by an intelligence or evolved in an undirected process.  This is illustrated in the watchmaker analogy.

This highly subjective process can easily lead to false positives. IOW, we think we see a design pattern, when there really isn’t one at all.

Michael Shermer, addresses this in an article on patternicity.  As he points out, seeing patterns that don’t really exist is in our human nature and occurs in all aspects of life:

Why do people see faces in nature, interpret window stains as human figures, hear voices in random sounds generated by electronic devices or find conspiracies in the daily news?

A proximate cause is the priming effect, in which our brain and senses are prepared to interpret stimuli according to an expected model… Religionists see the Virgin Mary on the side of a building… Conspiracy theorists think 9/11 was an inside job by the Bush administration.

Is there a deeper ultimate cause for why people believe such weird things? There is. I call it “patternicity,” or the tendency to find meaningful patterns in meaningless noise.

And now for the musical number.  Here’s Of Montreal with “Disconnect the Dots”.