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Unintelligent design
Jan. 18th, 2007 04:54 pmThere 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.