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Unintelligent design
There are many reasons why the argument for a god is flawed, but using so-called "intelligent design" to support it is one of the absolute worst. If you consider how many mistakes we embody it becomes clear that our design is actually clear evidence for evolution, not any god.
wisdom teeth -- the mutation that caused our skull and brain to distort and grow to such an outlandish size also warped our jaws. There is no longer any room for our back set of molars -- our so-called wisdom teeth -- and in many people they must be routinely extracted because of the havoc they wreak, often growing out horizontally and impacting the teeth next to them. Left to themselves these teeth can kill their owner. Hardly a good design choice.
vitamin C -- all humans have the genetic machinery to make vitamin C, like almost all other animals, but sadly for us a mutation far in our past has broken it. Scurvy has afflicted humanity as a result.
retina -- the light sensitive cells of our eyes face the wrong way. They point to the back of your eye instead of toward the light. This means that light is blurred and shadowed by having to pass through blood vessels and nerves on its way to the light detectors. This kind of accident is exactly the kind of thing you expect with evolution, but is the opposite of what any intelligent designer would construct.
blind spot -- related to the previous point, each of us has a large blind spot in each eye, where the nerves that are on the wrong side of the light receptors must carry their signals through a hole in the back of the eye to the brain.
color vision -- our impoverished sight lets us see just 3 primary colors and perhaps another 10 color mixtures. Compare this with most of the worlds creatures, who see 4 primaries and more than 25 distinct mixtures. It is clear that our mammalian ancestors were nocturnal for some long time, during which there was a great advantage in maximising extremely sensitive night vision, which lacks color discrimination, so color vision was all but lost. Later, when mammals began to fill daytime niches they developed some of their color vision again, but the genetic codes for seeing ultraviolet was lost permanently, along with much of the world's splendour.
spine -- the structure of the back is really not designed for upright stance. A good design would probably have eventually evolved if further refinement hadn't been brought to a standstill by the explosive development of our brain. Now we have a back that is not really good for upright stance, or anything else. We see the result of this in the incidence of back problems.
neck -- the sudden production of a massive cranium and the weight of the enormous brain within it overloaded the atlas bone, which is the joint this all sits on, atop the spine. Ever wonder why we get so many neck problems?
feet -- another casualty of our upright stance is our feet. Some of us are lucky enough to have high, springy arches, but a large proportion of humans have feet that are flat and quickly become painful to stand upon for any length of time. We had not yet completed evolving a good foot design before it was stopped in its tracks by our incredible brain.
the appendix -- we have a small appendix that other animals use as an extra stomach to help digest vegetation. In most herbivores the appendix is large. Ours is merely a reminder of our evolutionary heritage. It is just big enough to catch and breed up large populations of bacteria to become a direct threat to our life when it goes septic... and then, as appendicitis it kills us.
faith -- we have the ability to believe fairytales written by superstitious savages 2,000 years ago in preference to seeing the real world in front of us. (An example here is the continued labelling of homosexuality as "unnatural" when all intelligent species indulge in it -- it may be a lot of things, but unnatural, it obviously is not.) It seems absurd that any god would wish such dangerously insane behavior upon us.
additional:
menstruation -- it is bad enough that women have periods every month (most animals manage with just once a year) but the painful cramps and mood swings that accompany them are sure signs of unfinished evolution rather than design by a cruel god. (Thanks Sue!)
If you can think of more examples please tell me. I want to eventually build up a big list.
wisdom teeth -- the mutation that caused our skull and brain to distort and grow to such an outlandish size also warped our jaws. There is no longer any room for our back set of molars -- our so-called wisdom teeth -- and in many people they must be routinely extracted because of the havoc they wreak, often growing out horizontally and impacting the teeth next to them. Left to themselves these teeth can kill their owner. Hardly a good design choice.
vitamin C -- all humans have the genetic machinery to make vitamin C, like almost all other animals, but sadly for us a mutation far in our past has broken it. Scurvy has afflicted humanity as a result.
retina -- the light sensitive cells of our eyes face the wrong way. They point to the back of your eye instead of toward the light. This means that light is blurred and shadowed by having to pass through blood vessels and nerves on its way to the light detectors. This kind of accident is exactly the kind of thing you expect with evolution, but is the opposite of what any intelligent designer would construct.
blind spot -- related to the previous point, each of us has a large blind spot in each eye, where the nerves that are on the wrong side of the light receptors must carry their signals through a hole in the back of the eye to the brain.
color vision -- our impoverished sight lets us see just 3 primary colors and perhaps another 10 color mixtures. Compare this with most of the worlds creatures, who see 4 primaries and more than 25 distinct mixtures. It is clear that our mammalian ancestors were nocturnal for some long time, during which there was a great advantage in maximising extremely sensitive night vision, which lacks color discrimination, so color vision was all but lost. Later, when mammals began to fill daytime niches they developed some of their color vision again, but the genetic codes for seeing ultraviolet was lost permanently, along with much of the world's splendour.
spine -- the structure of the back is really not designed for upright stance. A good design would probably have eventually evolved if further refinement hadn't been brought to a standstill by the explosive development of our brain. Now we have a back that is not really good for upright stance, or anything else. We see the result of this in the incidence of back problems.
neck -- the sudden production of a massive cranium and the weight of the enormous brain within it overloaded the atlas bone, which is the joint this all sits on, atop the spine. Ever wonder why we get so many neck problems?
feet -- another casualty of our upright stance is our feet. Some of us are lucky enough to have high, springy arches, but a large proportion of humans have feet that are flat and quickly become painful to stand upon for any length of time. We had not yet completed evolving a good foot design before it was stopped in its tracks by our incredible brain.
the appendix -- we have a small appendix that other animals use as an extra stomach to help digest vegetation. In most herbivores the appendix is large. Ours is merely a reminder of our evolutionary heritage. It is just big enough to catch and breed up large populations of bacteria to become a direct threat to our life when it goes septic... and then, as appendicitis it kills us.
faith -- we have the ability to believe fairytales written by superstitious savages 2,000 years ago in preference to seeing the real world in front of us. (An example here is the continued labelling of homosexuality as "unnatural" when all intelligent species indulge in it -- it may be a lot of things, but unnatural, it obviously is not.) It seems absurd that any god would wish such dangerously insane behavior upon us.
additional:
menstruation -- it is bad enough that women have periods every month (most animals manage with just once a year) but the painful cramps and mood swings that accompany them are sure signs of unfinished evolution rather than design by a cruel god. (Thanks Sue!)
If you can think of more examples please tell me. I want to eventually build up a big list.
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Mammals can't see it, but birds, fish, insects, reptiles, amphibians, and practically every other animal on the planet, can. The dinosaurs could almost certainly see ultraviolet and had a much more beautiful view of the world than our sad 3-color eyes give us!
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Damn it, I want to see in the ultraviolet spectrum!
*shakes fist at God*
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Years ago some people had plastic lenses put in that were transparent to ultraviolet. They're sensitive to ultraviolet too, though again, not as a separate color.
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Came as a complete surprise to me, but if I ever need my eyes operated on then I know what I'll be asking for. ;)
"Ophthalmologists report that those who, for medical reasons, have had their retinal lenses removed and replaced with clear plastic can see into the ultraviolet <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ultraviolet> and view electric purple on the spectrum <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/spectrum> beyond violet because it has been shown that the retina has some ultraviolet sensitivity which is normally blocked by the retinal lens"
from the wikipedia article on "purple"
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Some time back I read an account of someone who's had the surgery you mention. [fossicks around for the link...]
Ahhh... here it is:
http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2005/04/04/8255929/index.htm
CNN Money?? Fortune magazine???? Certainly not my usual reading material. Must have found it in a google search.
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I just now remembered David Attenborough's answer when, in an interview he was asked whether he believed in a creator. He answered that there is a little worm whose life cycle requires it to take up residence in the eye of some larger animal, blinding the host. He has seen first hand the devastation that causes to people and other animals. He feels that it would be pretty mean spirited for any creator to design such a creature.
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I mean -wisdom teeth - I don't have 2 of 'em at all. Does that make me more advanced?!?
And Feet - I have high arches. Does that make me more advanced? Or am i more STOOPID cuz my ancestors spent more time developing nifty feet instead of that incredible brain?!?!?!
;-)
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I have high arches too, but I have terrible "English" teeth, with just a few of them meeting when I close my mouth. I am so buck-toothed that my top front teeth are about half an inch beyond my bottom front teeth. (Oh yes, I'm a real looker.:)
Does that make me superior because the distortion should give me a bigger brain casing? Or am I inferior because in the wild I would surely have died in my early teens?
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Good for you!
Have you got another book in the works?
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This year I'm extending "Damek Keep". It'll be long, but I want the whole dang story told in one book instead of 2.
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Does Infrared count as a 5th primary colour?
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Some snakes use a different strategy, with indentations that look like jet intakes along each side of their bottom lip. And some have the sensors on other parts of their head. They can locate heat sources very accurately with these because the receptors are at the bottom of little pits, that by their shape are directional -- no lens needed.
We are more sensitive to infrared than people generally think. If you close your eyes, with a bit of practice you can locate a boiled kettle using the palms of your hands. If you hold them up so they are flat you can face them all around to easily sense heat. Your face and thighs are probably very sensitive too; mine are.
I'm not sure, but I have a feeling that some animals include infrared in their eyes, but I expect they would be animals with compound eyes. They don't use a single lens so the difficulty in focussing infrared is not such a problem for them.
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Ratfan
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The cruel pain, mental anguish, and waste of blood are sure signs of unfinished evolution rather than intelligent design.
That definitely goes onto my list. Thanks Sue.
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Unintelligent design
(Anonymous) 2007-01-21 03:39 am (UTC)(link)Cheers, MFG.
Re: Unintelligent design
I have to go out today so I'll see if I can get a copy (AU$17.95).
The Blind Watchmaker is another book I must get around to reading one day. I have an electronic copy, so I really have little excuse for not reading it yet. It didn't occur to me that it would cover lots of these things... I mean, heck! it should have been clear to me from the title alone.
Thanks oodles.