Unintelligent design (recurrent laryngeal nerve)

That's right we are talking about the RLN which happens to be fully functional, allowing one to breath, swallow, talk and sing. Performing both voluntary and involutary functions very well. Actually I think the onus should be on you to provide evidence of why you believe the RLN is fecked up!After all it works fine for everyone I know.

I never denied this. You were the one that said it had to take the route it does, because if it didn't we wouldn;t be able to swallow or talk like we do now. I asked you for evidence for that claim, and so far, you haven't porovided any. The nerve itself is fine. The route it takes is not a hallmark of an intelligent designer, however. SOmething you claimed it was. Of course it does. The route hoewever is extremely badly designed.

Since you seem to have forgotten I'll remind you of your initial claims, before you run the goalposts off the pitch completely. Are you now retracting those claims?TTFN,WK

Since you seem to have forgotten I'll remind you of your initial claims, before you run the goalposts off the pitch completely. Are you now retracting those claims?BUMP!

Hi Big Al,I've been reading along in this thread, and at first it seemed like you'd forgotten your train of thought, which is fine, happens to all of us when discussion threads get long, but now with this latest post which is just a copy of WK's post that you're responding to with a "BUMP" at the end, I'm no longer able to make any sense of what you're doing. Were you attempting to quote WK and accidentally posted before you were done?--Percy

If you wanted to plug your TV into an outlet 3 feet away would you go get a 100 foot extension cord and run it around the entire house and then plug it into the outlet 3 feet from the TV? Does this sound like an intelligent design?

Fallacious Analogy, a nerve is not simply an electric extension ...Anyways, these dysteleological arguments are simply arguments from ingnorance. As evolutionary philosopher of science Daniel Dennett points out:There is simply no denying the breathtaking brilliance of the designs to be found in nature. Time and again, biologists baffled by some apparently futile or maladroit bit of bad design in nature have eventually come to see that they have underestimated the ingenuity, the sheer brilliance, the depth of insight to be discovered in one of Mother Nature’s creations. Francis Crick has mischievously baptized this trend in the name of his colleague Leslie Orgel, speaking of what he calls Orgel’s Second Rule: Evolution is cleverer than you are.Dennett, D.C., Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life, Simon and Schuster, New York, p. 74, 1995AbE This is probably a hit and run post, since I have little time for EvC this summer while I'm working 70h a week. But maybe I'll respond if something worthwhile comes out.Edited by slevesque, : No reason given.

The analogy holds. The RLN travels a route that it doesn't need to in the same way that the electrical cord travels a route it doesn't need to. It is a poor design. Are you saying that we actually don't know the route that the RLN travels? So even if something appears to be badly designed it is in fact brilliantly designed in a way that we are ignorant of? Talk about an argument from ignorance.

How do you know it doesn't need to ? No that's not what I'm saying. That is not what Dennette said, he says that this so frequently happened in the past that Crick could even identify it as a clear trend. The dysteleological arguments made back then were falacious arguments from ignorance, and in fact this kind of thinking is very anti-scientific. (Why search for a brilliant design when you have already concluded it can't be the case ?)

No offense to you personally, but I don't like your "take a step back" approach.We're disgussing a specific problem with the pathe the RLN takes: and you're discussing Dysteleology in general.Apparently you don't have anything to help with the specific discussion that this thread is about.Its like in my thread: Theropods and Birds showing a change in kinds, where you avoided the specific case presented and took a step back to discuss genotype/phenotype relationships.It just seems like you're avoiding discussing the actual issues...{/end rant}

No offense taken, but I think if the reasoning used is flawed in general, why even bother to discuss a particular subset case ?I said it earlier in this thread: there is currently no clearly known functions the RLN takes the route it does.We do know, however, that the RLN can sometimes take the direct route (as WK linked earlier), and so if this direct route is an available option in the population, as an evolutionnist you must ask yourself why hasn't it been selected for ? Why is the indirect route still the fixed form in the population after millions of years ? The answer seems to be that it does serve a function that we are unaware of right now.In fact, the fallacy (argument from ignorance) in dysteleological arguments is exactly the same as the one in Behe's irreducible complexity argument. Yet it is only due to confirmation bias that you adequatly identify it in that case but not in the case of dysteological arguments such as this one.

Because there's no advantage to survivability if it does. For evolution, it is completely irrelevant that it takes the long route, it has no impact on survival. However as an engineer, it's completely stupid to make it take that route. No, since the people that have it go directly there are functioning completely fine in every aspect. Until you show it has a different function, than " what ifs" are not going to get you anywhere.

Because there is nothing about the route which adds to function in the same way that routing more electrical cord does not add function to the tv. This makes the teleological argument moot and unfalsifiable. Any poor designs are instead good designs that we are ignorant of. That's a very poor argument. Please show us how the route of the RLN is vital to the function of the RLN. If you can't, then please explain why it makes such a circuitous route.

Don't you find it unfair that the ID crowd is allowed to point to "brilliant designs" and yet critics are not allowed to criticize any designs? Should we start calling biological designs "double plus good"? What we are asking is why didn't the designer use the direct route, assuming that the route was available to the designer? For evolution, they are equal at the phenotype level so one is not selected over the other.

Aesthetic reasons?TTFN,WK