'the evolutionary scapegoat'

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Originally posted by blitz77:
Appendix isn't a very good example. It serves in an immune system role in your body, with many lymphoid follicles. It manufactures serveral kinds of antibodies, such as IgA, IgM and IgG immunoglobulins. Studies have shown that its presence reduces the occurence of ulcers and bowel cancers in humans (I recall a study in which in a sample of people who had cancer of the intestines, 84% of them had their appendix removed, and in a control sample, only 24% had their appendix removed).

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OK, how about my favorite design flaw in humans; the crossover air/food pipes?Many thousands every year choke to death because it is very easy for our air to be cut off.God didn't do a very good job with this design at all.Since Evolution predicts only good enough adaptation, this explanation makes better sense. Complex speech is possible with the crossover design, and the adaptive advantages (and there would be many) to being able to produce complex speech is greater than the disadvantage of an increased choking risk. Thus, the adaptation proliferates throughout the population, despite the potential risk.If you must think of humans being specially created, and not having evolved, you are left with God being a poor designer.I'll also throw out the poor, weak construction of our backs and knees. They are far from ideal for upright locomotion, which is why so many millions suffer with back pain and herniated disks, and why even a light blow to the side of the knee can produce big injuries.Also, why do we have a sharp ridge on the inside of our skulls, which damages the brain if we hit our heads just so? If the skull is meant to protect our brains from injury, and God designed our skulls, then why did he put a sharp ridge in there? Makes no sense.

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quoteriginally posted by schrafinator:
OK, how about my favorite design flaw in humans; the crossover air/food pipes? Many thousands every year choke to death because it is very easy for our air to be cut off.

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Millions of people die in car wrecks does that mean the cars are defective? No. Just a lot of bad drivers. If you chew your food you wont choke.

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You are missing the point. You said that the design of the human body was pretty much perfect.I am simply pointing out examples of where it is far from perfect, and in fact, the design is the cause of many injuries.The point is, God could have truly made a perfect being, with zero weaknesses, such as our propensities for choking. Our throats don't have to be designed that way, but they are. Why would God compromose like that?

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quote:God didn't do a very good job with this design at all.

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Yes he did, we just did a poor job of chewing.

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No, it isn't good design, because little children without teeth yet choke on small objects because God made them with a strong propensity to put things in their mouths.Why did God make so many of us poor chewers, then?

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Does it mean he did a poor job of designing the skin because we can be sunburned?

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Well, yes, by your logic, it does mean that God did a poor design job of some people's skin.

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You could also say he did a poor job of creating eyes and ears because we cant hear and see as well as dogs or cats. Surely this extra hearing would be benificial to survival. Why didnt we adapt?

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We see "better" than dogs already, and we see with much better acuity than cats because they are adapted to night vision and therefore don't see much detail.We did adapt by becoming able to use technology, such as weapons, to hunt our prey, rather than big teeth. We also became more intelligent by being able to plan far into the future, so we were able to think about setting traps, or we figured out that if we ran a herd of some animal off a cliff, they would fall to their deaths and we could eat them.

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quote:Since Evolution predicts only good enough adaptation, this explanation makes better sense. Complex speech is possible with the crossover design, and the adaptive advantages (and there would be many) to being able to produce complex speech is greater than the disadvantage of an increased choking risk. Thus, the adaptation proliferates throughout the population, despite the potential risk.

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Sounds like day dreaming to me.

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Wow, what a devastating counterargument.

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quote:If you must think of humans being specially created, and not having evolved, you are left with God being a poor designer.

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Does that mean that the body is a bad design?

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Some parts of it are far from optimal, yes. It is good-enough design.

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There are millions of ingenious mechanisms in the body. Reguardless of who made it, I beleive that it is a beautiful design.

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Nature made our bodies, and I also think it is amazing and beautiful, despite all of it's shorcomings.

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Do you think you could do any better?

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The point is not if I could do any better. The point is that you made the claim that the human body is clearly designed by God because it is do perfect. I am simply pointing out that the human body has many design flaws which are explained very well by the good-enough adaptation scenario put forth by the Theory of Evolution, and not so well by the "the human body is perfect and is therefore a sign of God's designing us" argument.

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quote: I'll also throw out the poor, weak construction of our backs and knees. They are far from ideal for upright locomotion, which is why so many millions suffer with back pain and herniated disks, and why even a light blow to the side of the knee can produce big injuries.

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How did the body adapt the protective ridges on the back of the vertebra? How does it know it needs that extra protection?

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A body doesn't "know" it needs extra protection. Variation exists within a population already, unless they are all clones. If an individual (or several) posesses a trait which makes it possible, in the current environment, to be more sucessful at reproducing itself than others in the population which do not have this trait, the trait will therefore be more likely to be present in the more numerous offspring of the individual that has the trait.In other words, natural selection resulted in greater reproductive success to those individuals in a population of early humans which had those protective ridges on their spinal columns.

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If the knees and back are not ideal then what would be a better design?

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The back would be straighter, not curved, and the disks between them would be much more thick and provide for more shock absorption. The abdominal muscles and lower back muscles would be much larger to stabilize the back, and we wouldn't have to exercise them so much to keep them strong. No one would ever have to be taught good posture, because perfect posture would be natural to us. Poor posture and lack of fit back and abdominal muscles is the source of much back pain.The knee joints should be larger, and the system of tendons and ligaments are not adequate to prevent pretty severe injury even by a light blow or a slight twist. The whole thing should have been designed to be much more stable and strong.

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quote:Also, why do we have a sharp ridge on the inside of our skulls, which damages the brain if we hit our heads just so?

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You have to hit it pretty hard. Not "just so". Very few people will be hit that hard in their life time.

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Actually, you can get this injury from whiplash, too, not just a blow to the head. And you don't have to hit your head all that hard to get a concussion or some injury to the brain.

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quote: If the skull is meant to protect our brains from injury, and God designed our skulls, then why did he put a sharp ridge in there? Makes no sense.

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That sharp ridge makes plenty of sense its for structrial reinforcement. A uniformly smooth curve with no reinforcement is very weak. Like an egg shell.

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No, a thicker skull or even a smooth ridge might make sense, but why a sharp ridge?

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If evolution and natural selection were responsable for creating us and relied on variations that were just "good enough" then why dont we still have all of the variations that are totally useless and non life threatning? Like an extra ear on our back that doesnt work. Its not life threatning so natural selection wouldnt eliminate it.

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Well, it is unlikely that we ever had an extra ear on our backs that didn't work, so I am not sure why you use this as an example.The ToE doesn't predict that once a variation becomes obsolete it will immediately be selected against, it's true. If, like you say, it isn't life-threatening, then it might persist in a population for a very long time because the environment isn't selecting against those individuals which possess the trait.However, we still have the "goose bumps" response, which is a vestigial response to fluffing up our long-gone fur when we were cold.On the other hand, I was born with a variation to my wisdom teeth in that I only have the top ones. The bottom ones don't exist.If you understand this, then I am not sure why you are having a hard time accepting that the human body isn't designed perfectly.

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But still our bodies only have the minimal necessities to allow us to function.

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Right. This is what the ToE predicts.------------------
"We will still have perfect freedom to hold contrary views of our own, but to simply
close our minds to the knowledge painstakingly accumulated by hundreds of thousands
of scientists over long centuries is to deliberately decide to be ignorant and narrow-
minded."-Steve Allen, from "Dumbth"

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[This message has been edited by schrafinator, 07-15-2002]

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Originally posted by Jonathan:

But how significant is this advantage? Would it be enough to have a significant impact on his or her reproductive status?

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I think you might be thinking on too small of a scale over too short of a time frame.If you can concede that the existence of eyebrows is advantageous at all, then over time, why wouldn't it confer a survival (thus reproductive) advantage?Just a few posts ago, you claimed that the ToE predicts the existence of useless features, like a third nonfunctional ear on our backs.Now you seem to think that it has a problem explaining the existence of eyebrows, which do have a purpose and confer a small advantage.This is contradictory.------------------
"We will still have perfect freedom to hold contrary views of our own, but to simply
close our minds to the knowledge painstakingly accumulated by hundreds of thousands
of scientists over long centuries is to deliberately decide to be ignorant and narrow-
minded."-Steve Allen, from "Dumbth"

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Originally posted by Jonathan:
In theory yes. but in actual real world circumstances I dont beleive it would have any effect. Keeping the hair out of my eyes is helpful, but its not going to win over the ladies.

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This is the flaw I see in NS. Evolving a new tear duct is very helpful but it is not going to have an impact on my reproduction rate.

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One individual has a better functioning tear duct than another individual.The individual with a better ability to wash debris out of their eye is more likely to avoid eye injury and infection. (As it is, humans use eye protection to this day as our eyes are very vulnerable to scratching and getting stuff in them) Injury and infection can lead to loss of vision, which would certainly affect the individual's ability to find food and avoid predators and injury. Earlier death means fewer opportunities to breed.A disfigured eye would probably be repulsive to potential mates, thus reducing the potential to breed.Therefore, the better-functioning tear duct confers a reproductive advantage and since the better tear duct individual will tend to breed more frequently, their better tear duct genes tend to proliferate throughout the population.------------------
"We will still have perfect freedom to hold contrary views of our own, but to simply
close our minds to the knowledge painstakingly accumulated by hundreds of thousands
of scientists over long centuries is to deliberately decide to be ignorant and narrow-
minded."-Steve Allen, from "Dumbth"

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Originally posted by Jonathan:
I see your point. All of these traits can theoreticaly offer a survival advantage. However I dont think that the "advantage" they offer would have much impact on their ability to reproduce.

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Sure I can see how opposable thumbs can be extreamly advantageous to survival/reproduction. But if all of your species have no spinal ridges (and you are the first to have these) then for this to be advantagous to you all of the others in your species would have to be regularly suffering from spinal injuries otherwise you would have very little advantage over the others. You compared this to a disfigured eye being repulsive to all other mates but if you were the first to have a tear duct then the rest of your species would have disfigured eyes, not you.

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If natural selection works as well as you theorize then why do we have genetic predispositions towards obesity, poor eyesight, poor hearing even baldness? These traits have a much greater impact on their survival/reproductive success then say spinal ridges, eye lashes, eyebrows or any other trait with low "survival influence."

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You can call it incredulity but I just dont think that your model for reproductive success will work like you plan. Just because an individual has an improved design (tear duct, eye brow)over the others does not AUTOMATICALLY mean that he will have a reproductive or survival advantage over the others.

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Gene pretty much answered this, but I would just like to point out that you making a pretty common but MAJOR mistake concerning what the ToE predicts.The ToE does not predict that suddenly, "poof!" someone will be born with a modern tear duct where before, none of their ancestors had anything like a tear duct. The ToE predicts that change comes over time, over many generations.

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If natural selection works as well as you theorize then why do we have genetic predispositions towards obesity, poor eyesight, poor hearing even baldness? These traits have a much greater impact on their survival/reproductive success then say spinal ridges, eye lashes, eyebrows or any other trait with low "survival influence."

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On the other hand, if the human body was "perfectly designed by God", why do we have these problems in the first place?

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Originally posted by John:

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Originally posted by schrafinator:

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If natural selection works as well as you theorize then why do we have genetic predispositions towards obesity, poor eyesight, poor hearing even baldness? These traits have a much greater impact on their survival/reproductive success then say spinal ridges, eye lashes, eyebrows or any other trait with low "survival influence."

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On the other hand, if the human body was "perfectly designed by God", why do we have these problems in the first place?

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Cause God is near-sighted.... obviously.... geez...

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Duh! What was I thinkin'?LOL!

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Originally posted by Jonathan:
You guys are right. Im such a fool for beleiving in somthing as silly as that.

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What was I thinking?

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You believe that God is nearsighted?------------------
"We will still have perfect freedom to hold contrary views of our own, but to simply
close our minds to the knowledge painstakingly accumulated by hundreds of thousands
of scientists over long centuries is to deliberately decide to be ignorant and narrow-
minded."-Steve Allen, from "Dumbth"

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Originally posted by Jonathan:
You know what I meant.

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Well, yes, but don't you see the point?The point is, you didn't really think through the idea of the human body being "perfectly designed." You already disregard the ToE and Biology when it is clear that you don't really know what it's all about.I don't think you are silly for beliving in God. However to say that the human body is perfectly designed is rather silly.I think it's silly to hold a belief that is contrary to reality, especially when you have not gone to the trouble of investigating the facts before deciding upon what to think about them.Go to the TalkOrigins website and look around the FAQ pages. You have several very fundamental gaps in your knowledge concerning science and the ToE; you hold some pretty major misconceptions. The website is the best online source of scientific information for the layperson which deals with the subject at hand. You would serve yourself well to get a good grounding in the research before you make descisions.TalkOrigins Archive: Exploring the Creation/Evolution Controversy