Unintelligent design (recurrent laryngeal nerve)

As has been said repeatedly - we know why the RLN takes that route. It is not a mystery. We have a perfect explanation. We do not need to look any further. It is smoking gun evidence of evolutionary development. Ball's in your court...

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However, the issue is to prove the second premise (the first being true)

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The Reccurent Laryngeal nerve has not been shown to be well designed
therefore it is a bad design
therefore a bad design exists in nature

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Which is, as I have said, an argument from ignorance.

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And it is NOT the argument in the OP.The OP points to a specific reason to infer bad design: Further discussion addressed the issue of whether the route of the nerve served some other function and the evidence indicates that it does not.(As an aside, Behe's argument is also misrepresented. Behe's argument is supposedly an "in principle' argument and the main problem is the underlying assumptions, not the logic of the argument.)

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I will finally add that holding on to that argument is anti-scientific. If you have already concluded that the RLN route has no function, you won't search for it. And if you don't search for it, you are unlikely to ever discover it if it does exist.

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Of course this argument essentially says that science must never come to any conclusions. Because if you come to a conclusion you will never reexamine it. This is doubly false. Firstly, if science never came to conclusions it would be useless. Secondly, the conclusions of science are always tentative and open to reexamination if the evidence warrants it.The fact is that the evidence strongly indicates that the route followed by the nerve has no function and that the more obvious route is a better design. This question can be reopened if more evidence comes to light but it would be foolish to assume that the route of the RLN does have a function and there appears to be no reasonable hope of productive research on the assumption that a function exists.Indeed, I must add that creationists often argue that we should conclude that abiogenesis is impossible even though the evidence is less solid (and more of an argument from ignorance) than in the case of the RLN. This is inconsistent with the view expressed above. (From a more scientific perspective there is a huge difference between shutting down a productive research program and spending time on research which has virtually no chance of finding anything).

One way forward would be to find an individual who has both laryngeal nerves taking a direct route. I say both because one nerve would not be sufficient proof of anything. After all we can all manage perfecftly well with one kidney or one testicle.From the evolutionists point of view such a person would be at a distinct advantage and their vocal performance should be excellent.
Infact they might expect such individuals to be more highly represented amongst singers, actors, in the theatre and for voiceover work.If the evolutionists can identify such a person, then this would be strong evidence that they are right. However, I suspect that 1) such a person does not exist and 2) if they do exist they are likely to have significant problems with vocalisation etc and are likely to be disadvantaged in this area.All those who have two non recurrent laryngeal nerves put your hands up!

Clearly it would. If one recurrent laryngeal nerve is damaged it has significant effects, both don't need to be damaged. Also the different nerves innervate different muscles so if the route affects the operation of those muscles it should be apparent for either nerve individually.You seem, once again, to be shifting the goalposts. No, they wouldn't. Can you show us any evolutionist in this discussion who has said that the direct route would affect vocal performance? The only person who ever claimed that the route made a difference to vocal performance is you, and you still haven't provided a shred of evidence in support of those claims.So please start providing evidence for your whimsical assertions or simply stop making them.TTFN,WK

No they wouldn't. Nobody here has said that the length of the nerve has anything to do with it's functionality. The only one who has asserted this is you, and you haven't shown a single scrap of evidence for your assertion. In fact, everything you did show showed how completely wrong and uninformed you were. Are you now finally going to show evidence for this? I'm not holding my breath.

As requested!

Are you really that thick? You do realize CS was doing the exact same thing as you, and just asserting some wild stupid stuff, to see if he could get you to see your faulty ways? You really think he meant that seriously? Man, I wonder how you manage to get by in normal life. I guess if someone told you that gravity is a lie, you'd jump straight out the window.

Never mind - I misreadEdited by Coragyps, : stupids

How about providing some of that mountains of evidence for intelligent design.Or did you find that it is easier to make a statement than it is to back it up?

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Facts don't lie or have an agenda. Facts are just facts

I declared exactly the same statement that Coyote did, he didn't have to back it up, why should I ? (Besides, the whole point of saying that was to point out that elephant Hurling isn't going to add anything to any discussion)And also, I don't have time to accomplish such a feat.

Hi Al,Unlike Huntard, I'm not so sure CS was being sarcastic, and in fact I think he's correct. The nerve conduction rate in mammals can be very rapid, but it isn't instantaneous. A common conduction rate is 30 meters/seconds, so if a giraffe's laryngeal nerve is 3 meters long then it takes .1 seconds in each direction. That would be .1 second to tell a muscle to contract, and another .1 second to tell it to stop. A giraffe would realize he's bitten his tongue as quickly as a dog, but that extra .1 second before stopping is plenty of time to cause serious pain and damage.There's even a survival component of the giraffe's long laryngeal nerve. Even though the nerves path from brain to chest and back up to the head have a fair amount of covering by skin and flesh, their great length means increased likelihood of otherwise non-fatal injuries damaging the nerves, thereby preventing the giraffe from eating and in effect killing it.The evolutionary hypothesis: Imperfect genetic copying during reproduction observed throughout all life is responsible for speciation and the resulting diversity. The route of the laryngeal nerve is an artifact of evolutionary history left over from ancient evolutionary ancestors whose brain was much, much closer to the plumbing around their heart.The design hypothesis is: It was designed that way for reasons unknown through a never-observed process by a never-observed being or beings.Once again, we have the morphological evidence, we have the process evidence, we have the evolutionary historical evidence, we have a scientific consensus across all nationalities, races and religions, we win. To get back in the race you have to find evidence outside Biblical stories so you can begin convincing those who take real world evidence seriously.--Percy

There's an important comment to be made about this meta-discussion, and that's that it's important to be able to support your claims with real world evidence. Hopefully Coyote would provide evidence upon request, and hopefully you'd do the same. I think the point Coyote is trying to make is that if you find the evidence for evolution unpersuasive, how is it that you're persuaded by a hypothesis that has even less evidence?--Percy

And I could ask him back, that if he finds the evidence for Design unpersuasive, how is it that he is persuaded by a hypothesis that has even less evidence ?I hope you see where I am going with this. We aren't sorting out a pile of evidence in a way that ''this evidence supports evolution'' and ''this evidence supports ID''. It is about taking the whole pile as a totality, and asking ''Which hypothesis fits this whole collection of data the best?''. I would answer: Intelligent Design. And you and Coyote would answer: The theory of Evolution. That's all.Of course, some pieces in the pile will have a better current explanation in the opposite paradigm. As is the case right now with the RLN, I perfectly understand the evolutionnary explanation (don't worry Granny Madga, I haven't skip over your explanation. I just didn't comment it). But similar situations have arisen hundreds of times in the past, vestigial organs and junk DNA are examples of that (See beginning of the thread), and in fact in almost every case, what seemed like some bad design repeatedly turned out to be quite the contrary (see the Dennett quote) and so I feel justifiedto think that the RLN is just another example of this. In fact, because of all these past examples and the fact that ID best explains the data as a collection, I would predict that a function for the indirect route will be found in the future.

One word - Prediction.I have never yet seen an IDist or creationist make any sort of falsifiable prediction that is a logical consequence of their theory.That is how science progresses. That is how competing scientific theories are evaluated and filtered.The theory of evolution can point to a multiplicity of verified and verifiable predictions.ID - unless you can show otherwise - is an exercise in post-hoc interpretation in such a way that any theory flexible enough can remain technically unfalsified.The predictions of ToE need to be compared and contrasted with those of whatever alternative is being proposed and ultimately that is the only scientifically demonstrable method of evaluating theories.No?

I've been sitting this out for a while.ID is religion lite, with the serial numbers filed off in hopes of fooling the unwary. There is no body of evidence supporting it, just belief.Claims to the contrary are welcome--but must be accompanied by evidence. (But beware the lesson of Behe at Dover.)

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Religious belief does not constitute scientific evidence, nor does it convey scientific knowledge.