Whenever I hear the phrase "intelligent design" I want to snort with laughter. Only some pompous fop of a preacher, willfully ignorant of anatomy, physics and physiology, could look at the design of the human body and conclude that it was designed that way on purpose. Yes, Genesis 1:26 says, "Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, the fowl of the air, and over cattle, and over all the earth." So what? The bible is full of stuff you would be crazy to take literally. Psalms 137:9 says, "Happy [shall he be], that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones.", but I don't see people taking that seriously.
I was raised Catholic, by the way, and spent a lot of time in church and catechism classes as a kid. The Catholic mass requires reading a couple passages from the Bible and — silly kid that I was — I thought that by the time I was an adult, I had probably heard every passage from the Bible. After all, by the time I was 18, I had probably been to mass close to 1,000 times. That's a lot of Bible verses and I heard a lot of them more than once, so I figured we had covered them all. Imagine my surprise when I finally got around to reading the Bible and found that most of it was new to me. Passages like the Psalm above would certainly have stuck in my mind if I had heard them as a kid (and there are several verses where kids are dashed against rocks, it seems to have been a pre-Christian fetish of some sort), but I had never heard them. To me, this is just another reason to be deeply skeptical about the Church. If they don't feel like they can expose their followers to the whole Bible, what does that tell you about their confidence in their own Holy Writ? But I digress...
So, let's explore this human body and its perfection. First off, we must note that human babies can just barely be born. Their heads are too effing big for the birth canal. A lot of them come out with elongated heads because they have to squeeze through (and some require surgery to get out). This means that infants can't have fully formed skulls, so they have to be born with dangerous soft spots in their heads. Intelligent design, God!
Next, let's check out the human skeleton. The back is woefully misdesigned. Nearly all humans have back problems at one point or another because the back was obviously evolved to support a horizontal creature and not a vertical one. The knee joint is particularly bad at kneeling — do it very much and you will have problems. The elbow joint dangerously exposes the ulnar nerve (which gives you the "funny bone" feeling when it gets hit). The neck is insufficient to properly support that honking big head: a sudden acceleration that wouldn't hurt other animals at all can put a human in a neck brace.
What of other anatomy? Well, let's see. The male urethra passes right through the prostate gland, which is prone to swelling (this true in the males of other species as well). So you have a collapsible hose that must be used every day passing through an organ that can swell and choke it off... yep, that's intelligent. Also with males, we have this crazy feature where the testes form inside the abdomen and drop down into the scrotum later on, leaving a soft spot in the abdominal wall that makes us prone to hernia later on. Let's not even get into the idea of using the same orifice for elimination as for procreation, that's just wacky (I was going to say "nuts", but didn't want to confuse the issue). Women have it no better. They're born with a fixed supply of eggs and their monthly cycle has a brain-dead design that requires the loss of blood (not to mention a hormonal roller coaster) on a regular basis. Smart!
Of course, we haven't even covered the silliest stuff. What is that appendix doing there? Nothing, just waiting to become infected and kill its owner. If you were designing a machine that had an oxygen metabolism and needed to take in food, would you plan to use the same passage for both functions? Yeah, that's good design. Would you naturally assume that the organ responsible for hearing would also house the mechanism of balance? If we were "intelligently" designed, why did the designer make our jaws too farking small for all of our teeth? Those "wisdom" teeth certainly don't seem like wise design.
No, the human body is a massive collection of kludges and imperfections. It works, but is subject to an awful lot of failures and chronic problems. Elsewhere in creation, the story isn't any better. Most creatures are full of design flaws. From the panda's thumb, to the vestigial wings of flightless birds, to the hip bones deep inside of whales, to the parthenogenetic lizards of the genus Cnemdophorus, nature is full of kludges, half-measures, make-dos, re-works and downright crazy adaptations.
In fact, these misdesigns are some of the strongest arguments in favor of evolution. Those tails that human embryos have, then lose, are pretty obvious signs, aren't they? What about the fetal teeth of certain whales that form, but never erupt, then get reabsorbed? Sounds like evolution to me. Those flounders that are born with an eye on each side, but then one eye moves over to the other side: evolution or intelligent design? Flightless birds which nevertheless have hollow bones to conserve weight? Maybe God just likes his penguins to have hollow bones! Nearly all of the "design flaws" I have described make perfect sense if we assume evolution as the design mechanism. Evolution finds it much easier to adapt existing structures to new purposes (horses with one hoof still have bones inside to support three toes) than to invent from scratch. Our backs are crappy because they are still evolving into place. Those wisdom teeth are a pain, but lots of people are born without them — probably a few more every generation.
Lastly, we have to mention the human brain (the eye? No, I'm not going there as there is plenty of evidence that supports the evolution of the eye — not once, but 40 to 60 different times). Yes, the brain is complex. But it's also easy to see its steady evolution from a bump of a notochord to the human brain. It's also a self-organizing structure, which makes it a little less remarkable. And if God designed the brain from scratch, why give it layers of functionality similar to less evolved creatures — why are the temporal lobes stuck on like afterthoughts? The real mystery has always been self-awareness and the mystery of the human soul. My guess (and this is pure speculation) is that we will eventually come to understand that all of the mystery comes from our poor understanding of complex, non-linear systems. It has only been in the last couple of decades that we've even started understanding these types of systems. Even fairly simple systems (see the Game of Life) can seem complex to us, too, we're just not very good at this. If a computer program can surprise us with its behavior, it's hardly surprising that people do.
No, I think "intelligent design" is just hubris. Puffing ourselves up like peacocks, we proclaim that we are so perfect that only a god could have created us. For me, all it takes is one look at my brother-in-law and I have to just laugh. Intelligent Design indeed!
Note: this entry is part of a series called "Thoughts on "Intelligent Design"",
which contains the following entries:
Intelligent Design
Teaching Intelligent Design
Intelligent Design Refuted
