Recurrent Laryngeal Nerve: Part II

Hi ICDESIGN, that was very well explained and written, and I'm not the only one who thinks so. A webpage at ICR written by Jerry Bergman has ripped you off already: Recurrent Laryngeal Nerve Is Not Evidence of Poor DesignYou really should send him an email and tell him you'll charge him with plagiarism unless he takes that page down. He would be well advised to follow our Forum Guidelines as closely as EvC Members do:

7. Never include material not your own without attribution to the original source.

--Percy

I think it would help if we included the entire exchange that you're replying to. It's short: If a mutation caused the Laryngeal nerve to break during fetal development then the fetus would die. Evolution doesn't have to "know' anything. Evolution is just the name we give to the process of mutation and natural selection.The term "natural selection" is actually well chosen because the selection process is entirely natural. Whether an organism is able to survive long enough to reproduce is determined by how well it competes in its environment. All it has to do is go about doing what it does naturally, and if at some point it is able to reproduce and contribute its genes to the next generation (including any mutations) then voila! It was selected!--Percy

The routing of the laryngeal nerve is genetic, but not the stretching.The elongation of the nerve during fetal development and later growth into an adult is not under any specific genetic control. It's just the general growth and development process. It just happens naturally. The genes in individual cells under genetic control respond to the pressures and needs of their neighboring cells to cooperate in the growth process, but there's no specific genes telling everything precisely how much to grow.The growth and development process is under the control of hormones and other body chemicals that are themselves under genetic control, but these hormones and chemicals are not carrying specific signals of "grow 1mm in this direction and 2mm in that direction." It's much more like just a general command to grow.Children that are small for their age are sometimes given growth hormone. The hormone has no specific instructions for each nerve, muscle and bone in the body. It's more like a signal sent to everywhere in the body to grow. The body itself with all its cells in cooperation figures out how much to grow so that all the joints and bones and blood vessels and nerves still fit neatly together.Here's an interesting picture: As neck rings were gradually added the nerves, bones, blood vessels and everything else all stretched naturally in response. That is all that happens to the laryngeal nerve during growth and development. There was never any need for specific genetic control to make it stretch.--PercyEdited by Percy, : Clarify.