Sunday, February 20, 2005

A Bad Day For Creationists 

Now that BoingBoing has picked up the story, expect webwide kudos today for the New York Times, who most ingeniously "shreds" the fallacy of intelligent design by showing how "incompetent and foolish" most biological design turns out to be:

In mammals, for instance, the recurrent laryngeal nerve does not go directly from the cranium to the larynx, the way any competent engineer would have arranged it. Instead, it extends down the neck to the chest, loops around a lung ligament and then runs back up the neck to the larynx. In a giraffe, that means a 20-foot length of nerve where 1 foot would have done. If this is evidence of design, it would seem to be of the unintelligent variety.

Such disregard for economy can be found throughout the natural order. Perhaps 99 percent of the species that have existed have died out. Darwinism has no problem with this, because random variation will inevitably produce both fit and unfit individuals. But what sort of designer would have fashioned creatures so out of sync with their environments that they were doomed to extinction?

The gravest imperfections in nature, though, are moral ones. Consider how humans and other animals are intermittently tortured by pain throughout their lives, especially near the end. Our pain mechanism may have been designed to serve as a warning signal to protect our bodies from damage, but in the majority of diseases -- cancer, for instance, or coronary thrombosis -- the signal comes too late to do much good, and the horrible suffering that ensues is completely useless.

Gotta love the resultant belief dichotomy: either God is the world's dumbest, cruelest engineer, or maybe that Darwin guy really had something...

posted by boyhowdy | 11:30 PM |

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Comments:

Nice follow-up, Anne. I stand corrected.

Certainly, for those who believe in God-as-planner, to presume that we know what God had in mind when planning based on our own fallible read of the results is a bit inappropriate, anyway. I accept the falsehood of my original dichotomy with as much humility I can muster.

# posted by  boyhowdy : 12:43 AM, February 22, 2005

 

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