There are countless genetic diseases and disorders that shouldn’t exist at all if the human race was designed by a benevolent creator. For instance, what about childhood muscular distrophy? How does it benefit any person in any way? The gene for it should never have entered the genome.
Also tonsils. There’s still so proof that they accomplish anything.
The female reproductive system, I might add, could probably be better streamlined and refined, to be more user-friendly for it’s owner. (Meaning a woman herself, you cads.)
We can’t digest cellulose.
Finger and toenails, while being (barely) useful, can become ingrown or broken.
On the other hand, I would point out that the intake orifices (orifi?) are virus and bacteria magnets. If you have a separate orifice for breathing, you’ve got two Germ Superhighways in place of one. I would suggest that reducing the chance of infectious disease may outweigh the chances of choking.
Now, on the other hand, why don’t we have X-ray vision and frickin’ laser beams attached to our heads?
I think we should redesign that whole digestive thing to only store the calories that we need to be healthy and discard the rest, not store them as fat.
There is no good reason for cellulite.
There’s also no logical reason for saggy boobs. The chest skin should be kept taught so that our boobs can remain perky until old age.
[sub]Certainly I’m not an overweight middle-aged woman with cellulite and drooping boobs.[/sub]
About a year ago, Scientific American produced a special publication devoted to humna evolution. At the end, was an article concerning how the human body would be designed if you were starting from scratch. I don’t know if it’s online or not, but it’s a good read.
That’s a fair sort of a strawman. I don’t think that anyone suggests that humans don’t suffer form diseases, and Christian religions view them as a sign of degeneration fomr the perfect ancestral human. They aren’t the legacy of a benevolent creator, they are the legacy of original sin.
There is a world of difference between what are clearly corruption of the original design even from a scientific viewpoint, and things like the prosate gland that clearly designed to exusts in their current location.
There is incontovertible evidence that they are functional lymph-type glands that serve to both trap and destroy oral infective agents as well as serving as a point at which antibpodies may be developed to deal with novel infections.
I don’t think any scientist or doctor believes they don’t accomplich anything do they?
I’d say allergies (as well as autoimmune disorders) represent a system without sufficient safeguards, reacting to mild stimuli with wild overcorrections. I hope somebody got fired over that.
Au contraire, sir. My huge schlong is in fact the ultimate achievement in evolution, the very peak of the history of life on this planet. Four billion years of nature, red in tooth and claw, have led to my wang, the perfect and ultimate manifestation of life.
Oh yes, I second on this one. I wish my knees weren’t as bad as they are. The right one will probably require surgery before the age of 25. Maybe the left one too…we’ll see.
Better eyesight and hearing would also be a much-needed improvement.
The heart simply shouldn’t be so easily cloggable. There should a device to remove cancer cells immediately from the body. I agree with many of the other points!
Possibly; this is in fact the common creationist response; that creatures like squid living in water don’t need the protection afforded by a backwards retina, whereas creatures living on land do.
Of course this neatly ignores the fact that not all creatures in the sea have the better retina design (i.e. vertebrates such as fish and cetaceans) and that not all molluscs live in the water (snails, although their eyes are a lot simpler than those of squid).
I think it’s more likely that the bad design is the result of evolution having to work with what was already available - once you get a certain way down the road, going forward in a complex way is an easier step than going back and doing the whole thing more simply.
TMI WARNING!
As a woman I think it would be great if we could “hold in” our monthly bleedings the way we can with pee. Maybe there’s other fun things we could do with the extra muscle as well, though I guess the amount of extra strength needed to achieve this feat might worry the fellas.