Intelligent Design's idiotic designer
Intelligent Design's idiotic designer: "Cory Doctorow: A fantastic editorial in this weekend's NYT shreds the idea of 'Intelligent Design' (a pseudo-scientific, crypto-Christian-fundamentalist way of talking about Creationism without mentioning God) by taking apart the incompetence and foolishness of the supposedly intelligent designer.
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.Link (via Kottke)"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.
And why should the human reproductive system be so shoddily designed? Fewer than one-third of conceptions culminate in live births. The rest end prematurely, either in early gestation or by miscarriage. Nature appears to be an avid abortionist...
(Via Boing Boing.)
Really? hahahaha this is a joke...drowning in the minutia of it...how about if we were anycloser to the sin we'd burn or anyfurther away we'd freeze....& others could argue that diseases like cancer ...are man made/caused...Im no "holy roller" but I see this argument as weak...c yaaaaa
Yeah, this *is* a joke, but it reduces the whole argument of intelligent design to absurdity. The point being, the concept of intelligent design is a religious one, not a scientific one. If you look at the scientific evidence, there are plenty of places to criticize the 'design' of the life forms on the planet. The point being, we're an accidental success with plenty of imperfections, not the materpiece work of a genius inventor. You can believe whatever you like, it is your right. But, if you are going to apply the rigors of science to your argument, you have to look at all the evidence, not just make broad-brush claims that 'things look good, and the odds of this particular state of events happening are low in the context of all possibilities, therefore they must be by design.'
PS: If one were to make the argumetn that diseases like cancer are man-made, they'd be wrong. Cancer is a naturally occuring state that is as old as life itself. We have precancerous cells all throughout our body. Our immune system is responsible for eradicating most of it, every single day. It only turns into the fatal disease called 'cancer' when our immune system is no longer capable of eradicating the cells faster than they reproduce.
I don't know why these intelligent creationist folks keep trying. If they'd just take my advice and rewrite "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance", replacing all "Quality", " Quality" and "the Quality" references with "God", they'd have one of the best logical arguments for the existence of a religious creator ever written...