Lacadaemon
01-02-2005, 09:38
I was thinking the other day, and while pondering my unwarranted forum ban, a few things occured to me.
I have noticed, that if people do not get enough Vitamin C, they tend to die horribly. Now I could understand this if every animal suffered from the same malady, but most do not. Indeed, back in the days of sail, only the sailors would develope scurvy, while the livestock onboard ship would not. (This is also why many were skeptical of the British practice of adding lime juice to the Navy ration - it made no sense).
While I am at it, what about our knees and backs. Granted bipedal locomotion has its advantages, but surely a little tweeking to the structural engineering like thicker tendons, broader knees and vertabra could ameloriate a great deal of those problems. Also, why are our tendons so incapable of healing after the age of 40? What's up with that. Even more perplexing is that some people suffer from these problems and some do not (partly due to the morphology of their skeletons).
And don't even get me started on childbirth. The fact is, prior to modern medicine, many women died in child birth, simply because the baby's head was too large for the birth canal. Why does the birth canal pass through the reletively narrow pelvis? Surely the answer would be: a) Make the pelvis wider; b) place the birth canal above the pevis; or, c) some type of marsupial arrangement (Tiny fetus exits birth canal and finished development in a pouch - in fact the marsupial arrangement has much to commend it).
I can think of others, such as why do we get cancer, but sharks don't, but you get the point.
So all this got me thinking about creationism and intelligent design. I can understand that a hypothetical god doesn't want us to be immortal, but why build in all the defects. After all, if some entity was clever enough to build a shrimp from scratch, it should at least take some time to engineer out some of the above problems. After all I can see work arounds for them, and I can't build a shrimp from scratch. I can't believe that someone could grasp enough to figure out all the hard parts, and then be so slapdash as to not do a proper job with the things I have pointed out. If anything, it should be like logan's run, where we are all healthy (barring accidents) until our expiration date. But it isn't, we are full of design flaws that a first year engineering student would spot.
Intelligent design, more like bloody stupid design.
So I am forced to conclude, what with all the flaws (like the blind spot on our eyeball, that could be corrected by wiring the nerves to the back like in a squid), we must be a product of a random process. Any claim to the contrary - i.e. there was an "intelligent" designer behind us - makes no sense in light of all the design errors. And honestly, what else could it be? The other position is that something put all this time into figuring out DNA and enzymes then just blew off the implementation phase.*
I am going to start a stupid design movement, and insist that it gets taught in schools wherever intelligent design it mandated by the curiculum. It's only fair, and it is a legitimate scientific theory by the standards of creationists.
*Of course there another option. God is just dead lazy and slapdash about stuff.
Questions, comments, flames?
I have noticed, that if people do not get enough Vitamin C, they tend to die horribly. Now I could understand this if every animal suffered from the same malady, but most do not. Indeed, back in the days of sail, only the sailors would develope scurvy, while the livestock onboard ship would not. (This is also why many were skeptical of the British practice of adding lime juice to the Navy ration - it made no sense).
While I am at it, what about our knees and backs. Granted bipedal locomotion has its advantages, but surely a little tweeking to the structural engineering like thicker tendons, broader knees and vertabra could ameloriate a great deal of those problems. Also, why are our tendons so incapable of healing after the age of 40? What's up with that. Even more perplexing is that some people suffer from these problems and some do not (partly due to the morphology of their skeletons).
And don't even get me started on childbirth. The fact is, prior to modern medicine, many women died in child birth, simply because the baby's head was too large for the birth canal. Why does the birth canal pass through the reletively narrow pelvis? Surely the answer would be: a) Make the pelvis wider; b) place the birth canal above the pevis; or, c) some type of marsupial arrangement (Tiny fetus exits birth canal and finished development in a pouch - in fact the marsupial arrangement has much to commend it).
I can think of others, such as why do we get cancer, but sharks don't, but you get the point.
So all this got me thinking about creationism and intelligent design. I can understand that a hypothetical god doesn't want us to be immortal, but why build in all the defects. After all, if some entity was clever enough to build a shrimp from scratch, it should at least take some time to engineer out some of the above problems. After all I can see work arounds for them, and I can't build a shrimp from scratch. I can't believe that someone could grasp enough to figure out all the hard parts, and then be so slapdash as to not do a proper job with the things I have pointed out. If anything, it should be like logan's run, where we are all healthy (barring accidents) until our expiration date. But it isn't, we are full of design flaws that a first year engineering student would spot.
Intelligent design, more like bloody stupid design.
So I am forced to conclude, what with all the flaws (like the blind spot on our eyeball, that could be corrected by wiring the nerves to the back like in a squid), we must be a product of a random process. Any claim to the contrary - i.e. there was an "intelligent" designer behind us - makes no sense in light of all the design errors. And honestly, what else could it be? The other position is that something put all this time into figuring out DNA and enzymes then just blew off the implementation phase.*
I am going to start a stupid design movement, and insist that it gets taught in schools wherever intelligent design it mandated by the curiculum. It's only fair, and it is a legitimate scientific theory by the standards of creationists.
*Of course there another option. God is just dead lazy and slapdash about stuff.
Questions, comments, flames?