Richard Dawkins Demonstrates the Clearly Unintelligently Designed Laryngeal

It just goes to show the heads of fools, not diamonds, are the hardest things we know of.

that we don't yet understand.

In evolution, things don't need a reason, and they don't get redesigned. The nerve that took a direct pathway in fish millions of years ago is the same nerve that takes a 30 foot loop down the neck and back up in a giraffe.

The left vagus nerve, aka Cranial nerve X - DOES have a loop that goes around the aorta - the recurrent laryngeal branch of the vagus. (Right vagus has the recurrent laryngeal loop a bit higher, around the subclavian artery). However, the vagus itself is not the "throat" nerve (although it does provide some of the sensory innervation to the throat)... it continues down along the heart and then the esophagus down into the abdomen, innervating stuff all the way down to the stomach, liver, and part of the intestines.

But nitpicking aside, that's why embryology is so much fun. Really traces out evolution (and helps poor students studying anatomy to understand why some structures follow really weird paths).

Using this to argue against creationism is pretty much the same as using a banana's hand-friendly shape to argue for creationism.

They lay this out perfectly showing it's a poor design among tons of other things in the way animal bodies work and back up how this occurred in evolution from fish to other creatures that evolved from fish. They give a very, very logical explanation for what caused this odd design to come to be. The hand-friendly shaped banana was used as an argument based on a complete lack of understanding of how the banana was domesticated and dis-regarding dozens of other types of fruit that are extremely difficult to eat. This is just a small clip from the whole dissection. They go into all kinds of things like DNA etc to prove evolution.

the human body (they said this particular nerve is the same in humans ie: loops inexplicably around the heart or wherever and back up).

Example: childbirth and pregnancy - pisspoor design here. Women suffer a LOT of pain and bodily damage from this. Unnecessarily so. Bad engineering.

I'm convinced that if there is a God, (s)he/it is an ARTIST, not an engineer.

Big difference.

Allow me to introduce you to the spotted hyena, Crocuta crocuta



They're a simply fascinating animal and, I think, unfairly maligned (I'm looking at you, Lion King.) The point here is one of their more unusual features, unique among the mammals.

The female has a penis. Well, not really - the clitoris and inner labia of the female are fused to form a long erectile tube, and the outer labia are fused to form a pair of false testes in the back. This organ is important in dominance displays; higher-ranking females in the clan become erect around lower ranked females, who sniff and lick the organ (males do not engage in this rank-based greeting ritual).

But the most startling thing is... the hyena copulates and gives birth through this pseudopenis. The copulation is, shall we say, "tricky" - a female erection effectively prevents it at all, as the pseudopenis must be penetrated, and then inverted by the male. If you've ever seen hyenas mating (I'll bet you haven't!" it's about the most awkward scene of animals getting it on that doesn't involve hedgehogs.

Still with me? 'Cause it doesn't end there. four to five months later (depending on food availability) the female gives birth to a litter of two or sometimes three cubs. She gives birth through the pseudopenis, to a pair of babies that have huge heads and are, compared to their mothers, the largest newborns of any carnivore. Remember what the parts go into the structure of the pseudopenis? Yup... during birth, her clitoris rips open. As if that weren't fun enough, the internal birth canal meets the peudopenis passage at a right angle, making painful breech births and dead newborns quite common.

Oh, the horror doesn't stop there; hyena cubs are born with teeth, claws, and open eyes, and tend to build their own tunnel networks in the back of the den... where they hunt and devour each other Hunger Games-style.

This is all due to a quirk of hyena society; for whatever reason, hyena clans are matriarchal. The traits that one needs as a matriarchal carnivore include large size and an aggressive streak... and one of the fast tracks to that is elevated testosterone levels. Male and female hyenas have about the same levels of male hormones. And it just happens that this amount of testosterone tells the body, "build a penis." It's also why hyena cubs come out as mostly-developed angry little monsters.

So yeah. That's how spotted hyenas work.

...like I said, the alleged "God" if it exists was NOT an engineer. Cruel jokester, maybe? Eegh.

One of the things that's gotten me about intelligent design is the diversity of species; There are three "types" of moles, all unrelated; a laurasiathere group, an afrothere group, and a marsupial group. From a design standpoint, that's just redundant, right? Pick an eyeless burrowing bug-eater and stick with it wherever you need one, right?

"But," the apologist might say, "doesn't this prove that god is an artist?"

Nope, not to me! Because if we see god as an artist, well, there;s an astounding lack of diversity, and it's all very derivative. Again with the mole examples; why just these three? Why no moles in South America or Indonesia? Why not aquatic or seagoing moles, those fet would be great flippers! Why no birds as moles? Why not a new mole for every five miles? Why no giant moles chasing down prarie dogs or something? You've got moles with big feet and slightly less-big feet, you've got moles with a tentacle on its nose, this is the best you can do as an artist?

Basically there's too much diversity for meaningful design, and too little for artistry. Unless we believe that this being who is all-powerful and all-knowing, has the engineering capabilities of a caffeine-addict in middle management, and the creative range of Uwe Boll.

"Unless we believe that this being who is all-powerful and all-knowing, has the engineering capabilities of a caffeine-addict in middle management, and the creative range of Uwe Boll."

I believe 100% in evolution, but I think of it like an "intelligent" computation process for finding best results. I believe an error we can make in this day of genetic engineering is underestimating the transcendental wisdom of evolution, by seeing things through our own design terms, and missing subtleties of the bigger picture.

The pharangeal nerve that's in giraffes is an example of a good-enough evolved structure. Obviously inefficient, but enough giraffes survived despite that nerve that the nerve structure continues to propagate.

But what I wonder is if the genetic code isn't somehow preserving information. For instance, what if the gene that creates this odd design was actually favourable in some ancient previous species, and is preserved, because it could be favourable again in some distant future mutation of the giraffe?

Again, I'm not arguing for the wisdom of a 6000 year old designer, I'm arguing for transcend wisdom encoded in this 2 billion year old process called evolution...

It reminds me of how the vas deferens goes up and loops around the pubic bone before going to where it needs to go. A ridiculous design that leaves a weakness in the abdominal wall that sometimes leads to hernias.

I mean, if you could genetically modify people to get rid of that, would you do it? Would you be so confident that there's no reason for it that you'd have no fear to change the gene pool permanently?

Survival of the fittest available offspring. Just doesn't have the same ring to it!

Our tiny human brains cannot possibly comprehend what a God had in mind.

I want to know why we need to rip other living species to a gruesome death in order to eat when an intelligent design would be like an air fern.

That's a loving god? I think not!

But there are so many its hard to choose. What is one of the most interesting is the evolution of the ability to talk in humans. The anatomical, brain and cultural aspects.

Now that is funny!

Sort of definitive proof that "Intelligent Design" isn't

The human eyeball - all vertebrate eyeballs, in fact, are sort of, uh... backwards.

The light-sensitive cells in our retina, the cones and rods, do not face towards the pupil, where the light comes from. Oh no. They face backwards, away from the source, and instead pick up light reflected from the back of your eye.

But before it can get there, the light has to get around the vascular passages that spiderweb across our retina and choroid! All these tubes, including the optic nerve come into the eyeball through the punctum caecum, a part of the retina that has no photoreceptor cells; so we have a physiological blind spot.

Not only does our eyeballs' lens turn the image upside down, but this system means that what we "see" is actually reversed as well! And very blurry. So our brains, from fish to man, have to compensate for this by basically "translating" and literally fixing the shitty images we get from our eyeballs. essentially? You don't actually see what you "see." What you think of as clear vision is mostly your brain filling gaps and translating binary flashes given to it by helpless, backwards organs.

Compare the the octopus, which has a retina that faces forwards and is supplied blood and nerves from the rear, giving an uninterrupted field of vision that collects light from the source and does not require that extra bit of "translation" to de-reflect and sharpen the image.

Of course, an inside-out eyeball shouldn't be that surprising, given the vertebrate body plan is essentially upside-down from everything else on the planet, I guess...

Excellent read...

Science in Action.

there can't be a God because I wouldn't design <fill in the blank> this way!

Just against intelligent design by god.