Evidence of design .... ?

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As far as flaws in the human body, such as our incredibly weak skin, fixed position of our ears, slow regenerative rates(if at all, depending on the wound) and the total vuneralbility of our internal organs, I would think that we are at best, an experiment if we were designed at all.

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You got a point. In fact, I now understand why my car is at best, an experiment. That is, if it was designed at all.The body of my car is incredibly weak. The most common speed limit I encounter is 35 mph. Yet if I hit a telephone pole at this speed, my car does not bounce off it. It folds, pops, and crumbles.Fixed positions? Yep, everything is essentially fixed. Headlights, for example.Slow regenerative rates? Hell, the human body has my car beat. It can’t regenerate at all. I have to buy new freakin’ parts!Vulnerability? I have had enough flat tires to know how totally vulnerable that part of my car is.The flaws in my car are everywhere.

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Did it occur to you that there is a very large difference between animals and cars? What might that difference be? Care to guess.

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Let me guess. Animals reproduce themselves and cars do not? That’s a design flaw of the car. Cars are completely dependent on extrinsic agents to fuel them, clean them, use them, fix them, and bring them into existence. Compared to an animal, a car is a kludge.Then again, I suppose what constitutes a flaw depends on one’s idealistic expectations.Take the incredibly weak skin. When it comes to serving as a barrier to water, UV light, and infectious organisms, the skin is not incredibly weak. Yet, when it comes to bullets and knifes, the skin is incredibly weak. Are we arguing that the skin should be strong enough to repel bullets?The problem with the flaw argument is that it has a built-in moving goalpost. Let’s say we fix the flaws in Pogo’s list. Someone will eventually come along and find ways in which the improvements are not good enough or point to other flaws. Because no matter how well you make the system, there is one flaw that serves as the ultimate escape-hatch: the body eventually dies. In other words, the only way around the flaw argument is to propose that a designer should build perfect, immortal bodies.

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However, you miss the point. It isn't a design flaw of the car I'm talking about. It is what makes the analogy totally off base.

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In exactly what way is the analogy off base? Because cars don’t reproduce themselves, we cannot identify flaws in car design?

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It's the imperfect reproduction with selection which can produce a form of design (just not "intelligent" design).

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You miss the point.

Here’s an illustration of my point, The problem with the flaw argument is that it has a built-in moving goalpost. Let’s say we fix the flaws in Pogo’s list. Someone will eventually come along and find ways in which the improvements are not good enough or point to other flaws :

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Take the combined opening of the air and food passage in humans. One would not expect this arrangement, which has no advantage, to appear in an intelligent design...and many other animals do not have this arrangement.

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Yet I can think of advantages to this arrangement:1. Every time you take a breath, you take impurities into your respiratory tract. It is lined with a sticky blanket of mucus that in turned is moved by cilia movement. The mucus traps the impurities and the cilia move the mucus blanket to the back of the throat, where it is swallowed. The impurities are either digested and absorbed or crapped out of the body. Thus, the arrangement is a clever way of handling a problem faced by our respiratory system.2. The mouth serves as an excellent back-up system for taking in air. It is used every time the nasal cavity swells shut (a cold, for example) or when the demand for air becomes excessive (during exercise).3. The respiratory and digestive system actually have a shared function — the sense of taste. Impulses from olfactory (nose) and gustatory (tongue) receptors participate in this sense (which is why you can’t taste when you have a cold).4. The mouth acts as a more effective conduit for expelling air (under high pressure) when you cough. This is why you naturally open your mouth when you cough.The disadvantage associated with this arrangement is, of course, aspiration. Does it outweigh the advantages?I checked out some statistics on the web. In 2000, 13 children from Arizona died from choking (children seem more susceptible to choking given their tendency to put things in their mouths). And census data shows that Arizona has 1,366,947 children.Let’s assume a very conservative 100 swallows per day. That would mean there were
5 E^10 swallows among the Arizonian children in 2000. Thirteen of these resulted in death, giving us an incident of 2.6 E^-10. That’s not a terrible failure rate. For example, I start my car, on average, about 10 times a day. And I’d guess that it fails to start about once every 1.5 years. That’s a failure rate of 4.1 E^-4Now, how many swallows does a person perform over a life time? Let’s say 1000/day. A person who lives to 80 will have performed 2.9 E^7 swallows. Even with this excessive swallowing of food, such a person is well below the failure rate associated with the trachea/esophagus arrangement. Explaining why choking deaths are not a major cause of death and also while most are preventable.The flaw associated with the trachea/esophagus reminds me of people who claim that flight is a flawed way to travel. Accidents can happen. But in the large scheme, air travel and swallowing are pretty darn safe.[This message has been edited by King Crimson, 06-30-2003]

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I think you misinterpreted our objections. The trachea/esophagus arrangement was indeed advantageous to the lungfish from whom we inherited it. Every 'advantage' you listed in defense of the arrangement is perfectly consistent with the evolution of the human throat within the constraints of its inherited framework.

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You are moving the goalposts again. The original claim was that there was no advantage to the arrangement. I refuted that claim. In fact, let me add one more advantage — the same tongue that is involve in the digestive process also plays an important role in vocalization/speech.

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However, what we are trying to establish is whether this arrangement has advantages over and above all other conceivable designs, which would certainly be more persuasive evidence of Intelligence.

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That’s a strange thing to establish given that none of you have the slightest idea about how to actually design a humanoid organism. Sure, you can imagine states and maybe even draw something on the piece of paper. But that’s not the same thing as actually designing such a thing. Conceiving a way to split apart the respiratory and digestive tracts of a mammal is not the same as demonstrating this is a better design (considering the overall organism).Furthermore, you apparently want to tie Intelligent Design to The Best Possible Conceivable Design. That’s called Turning Intelligent Design Into a Straw Dog.

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We have a plausible explanation for the structure, advantages, and shortcomings of the design. You merely assume that it's a product of Intelligence based on the fact that it's 'pretty darn safe'?

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You are the one assuming that I assume it’s a product of Intelligence.

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None of 1..4 cannot be accomodated by a design that doesn't have a single point of failure.

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Actually, I added another above (make it five). I suppose we could conceivably accommodate all these changes, such that we keep the advantages and drop the disadvantage. Whether such a creature would truly be better off is, in the end, only a speculation. The problem comes when we add in all the other flaws that are supposed to be corrected. When we put all the corrections in place, it’s not clear such an entity would be a better version of a human being. As far as we know, you may have just created a whole new series of problems (that could be considered flaws).

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Your calculations are also way off.

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I don’t think so. I estimate failures per swallowing event and you estimate failures per hour. I think the former method gives us a better feel for how well the system performs. For example, if we take your figure of 1.5 X 10E-3 failures per hour, this doesn’t have much meaning. For the same figure equates with one failure every 667 hours. That’s about 28 days. Sorry, but I don’t nearly choke to death every month. Again, if there were 5 E^10 swallows among the Arizonian children in 2000, 13 failures is not a sign of bad design.

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13 incidents over a year resulted in fatalities, that does not tell us about unreported events or near-misses that have been averted by 'operator intervention'.

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Good point. But we can balance this out by considering that most choking events are a consequence of behavior, not a break down in the anatomy/physiology. Most choking events occur because people rush and swallow food without sufficient chewing or because they laugh and talk excitedly while eating. Alcohol consumption also plays in a role in many choking events. So, we could raise the incidents by gathering unreported events or near-misses, but then lower it again by factoring out choking events caused by sloppy use of the system.

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And your 13 was only in one state.

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I’m assuming the frequency of choking is not much different in Arizona than in other places. Add more states, you have more choking events. Not surprising since you also have many more swallowing events.

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I'm not sure that I said there was 'no advantage' to the design, what I have said is that if a human design team were working on a similar problem that this design would have been rejected via the safety analysis.

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Your original reply to me explicitly stated:

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Take the combined opening of the air and food passage in humans. One would not expect this arrangement, which has no advantage, to appear in an intelligent design...and many other animals do not have this arrangement.

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You did claim there was no advantage to the system and that is what I replied to.

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If humans engaged in design actively seek to eliminate common mode failures, and the human body has common mode failures in what way is there evidence for design?

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You skipped over my argument from above: Actually, I added another above (make it five). I suppose we could conceivably accommodate all these changes, such that we keep the advantages and drop the disadvantage. Whether such a creature would truly be better off is, in the end, only a speculation. The problem comes when we add in all the other flaws that are supposed to be corrected. When we put all the corrections in place, it’s not clear such an entity would be a better version of a human being. As far as we know, you may have just created a whole new series of problems (that could be considered flaws). Are you now going to make your argument stick by moving goalposts concerning types of flaws?

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It's not about suggesting that ID == BestD at all.

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Then you need to first hash this out with MrHambre, who tells me that you guys are trying to establish is whether this arrangement has advantages over and above all other conceivable designs. Otherwise, we have multiple moving goalposts around here.

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ID postulates that organisms exist due to an intelligent designer's
interventions. To find suitable evidence of design we can look
to existing designed systems and see if there are similarities
between biological systems and what we would expect to find
in an intellgently designed system.

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Here, you first need to hash this out with NosyNed. He tells us that we can’t take this approach because the analogy between things humans design and natural things is totally off base.

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One feature of safety critical system design is safety analysis
to identify potential failure modes and mitigate them. A further
aspect of such analysis is the ellimination of common mode
failures (especially in independent, critical sub-systems).

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The question that matters is the cost of eliminating any particular design feature, as this often translates as redesigning other features of the whole unit. In this case, the failure rate of the trachea/esophagus junction is not clearly serious enough to justify a complete overhaul of the system, given that any particular individual is highly unlikely to die from aspiration (as the data show).

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Human bodies do not appear to have undergone any kind of design review process or safety analysis because there are features present that even a human designer at our level of technology would reject.

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We are left with two possibilities (and sub-variants of)

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1) The designer was not very good.
2) There was no intelligence behind the design.

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Not at all. Until you design a humanoid body that lacks the design flaw, but is no worse in any other way, your conclusions are rooted in raw speculation. One could argue that the designer does not appear to be very good, but then we don’t have anything solid to move this beyond the level of appearance. Sorry, but a failure rate of 2.6 E-10 is not bad design.

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1..5 do not outweigh the dis-advantage. The disadvantage in this case can lead to catastrophic system failure (i.e. death) none of the advantages you mention can possibly outweigh that.

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This is a matter of opinion. The advantages I cite impart a day-by-day increase in the quality of life that is shared by all members of the human species. In return, there is a tiny little chance that any particular member of the species might choke to death and we can drive this chance to essentially no chance with some modest, common sense, behavioral adjustments. It’s not at all clear that the disadvantage outweighs the advantages, especially given that we nothing to compare it to.I’d also be careful about making death a problem. At some point, all organisms will die, meaning at some point a design decision will be made that allows for the potential for catastrophic system failure to occur. Unless, of course, you demand immortality from design.

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It's not about finding corrections for the sub-optimal ... it's about looking at known intelligent design processes and seeing if the human-solution appears to be designed based upon what we know of how we design things.

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Like I said, you’ll first have to argue this with NosyNed and determine whether or not analogies are allowed or out of place.

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You may not feel that failures per hour has much meaning ...the entire systems and safety community would tend to disagree since this is a probabalistic measure of failure in use in all human engineering.

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It’s not a question of feelings. Your numbers would mean that I should have a life expectancy of 28 days. Clearly, something is wrong with the way you analyze this. Thinking in terms of swallowing events is a superior approach.

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In a safety critical system ANY catastrophic failures that are due to the design are intollerable. That's why failure rates are set at 10E-9.

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I suppose this would be relevant if we swallowed 10 E9 times/hour. But if we assume 100 swallows/day, that’s only about 4/hour. A failure rate of 10E-9 is needlessly excessive.

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Mis-use is not a mitigation either. The people who choke do so during an 'intended' (if human's were designed) function of the system.

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I don’t agree. I once got lazy and used a chainsaw to saw away the roots of a bunch of large shrubs. I sawed through the dirt(it worked), but I eventually gunked up the chainsaw. I didn’t attribute its failure to flawed design.

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That the system can normally operate in a way that disrupts another safety critical system is NOT evidence that design effort has been put in.

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I am not arguing that the system (or human body) is designed. I’m pointing out that you have failed to establish that the trachea/esophagus junction is a design flaw (beyond the level of it looks flawed). If I did think the system/body was designed, I would find your argument unconvincing.[This message has been edited by King Crimson, 07-01-2003]