I realize that this is rather immaterial to the overarching point of the OP, but I have problems with one of the examples, namely, the following:
On the contrary, I can think of few places I would less like to have a large bundle of nerve endings than inside the vagina. Consider the fact that the vagina also functions as the birth canal; were you to pass a newborn through a narrow opening, would you enjoy having said canal awash in nerve endings? I suggest that the placing of the clitoris is not a flaw, but a feature, as it may serve as a useful screening process in the search for a suitable mate.
I think the implicit assumption is that the intelligent designer would design perfection. While there are tradeoffs, there are also design features (like the blind spot) which could be improved without affecting anything else. An optimal design isn’t necessarily optimal in all its components, but if a component can be improved while improving the overall quality (however it is measured) then the design is not optimal. If the designer were a space alien, no problem, but a god should be able to do better.
And of course we can predict that evolution produces crappy (but good enough designs.) All GAs and heuristics like simulated annealing get trapped in local maxima during the process.
Then he could have just designed us with instincts more in that direction. Our instincts are simply not what I would expect from a being who wanted nice behavior. And if he wanted to keep us humble he could have just created a second, more powerful species to keep us all as slaves or meat animals; that would be much more effective, and it’s not like moral issues would bother someone who inflicts suffering on a whole species to keep it humble.
Well, it does. Granted sufficient skill in genetic engineering it would be easy to improve humanity or most other species; not only are we full of design flaws, but the “designer” lacked vision. I mean, simply combine the various advantages of various animal species in one package ( including our intelligence ), and you’d have something pretty impressive without even otherwise improving on nature. Humans aren’t just badly designed; the basic design itself is rather pathetic.
In the state of nature, most children were miscarried or died in childhood; we aren’t all that functional, in a biological sense, as a group. Only the individuals who survived were. It’s our technology that has pushed our survival rate up so high, not evolution.
No, it wouldn’t; there’s plenty of evidence that we evolved; that doesn’t sway the creationists and it never will. I doubt that God showing up and announcing that we evolved would.
No, it’s a testimony of the triumph of intelligence over poor design. Eliminate our technology and there wouldn’t be 6 billion of us for long.
This is all opinion, rather than fact. Sorry, but given we are pretty much the dominant species on the planet (with only some bugs and bacteria giving us anything resembling any real competition), I cannot accept that we are “pathetic”, much less badly designed. Nor do I accept that evolution produces pathetic designs. Sure, an Intelligent Designer could have done any number of things when it came to designing and implementing species. But the species which do (and did) exist do not suffciently demonstrate that they were not designed simply because other designs can be imagined. We humans could certainly design better modes of transportation or energy production, but we don’t / haven’t.
Even taking the Biblical account of our creation literally, we were not intended to be the most brutally efficient predator/producer/decomposer/filler-of-all-ecological-roles, so why should it be expected that we could have been created as such?
High mortality rates do not translate to poor functionality; if anything, it’s perhaps more akin to good quality control (e.g., “defective” individuals are removed from circulation before they have a chance to corrupt the gene pool). But even then, high mortality rates have not stopped us from dominating most other life forms.
And our technology is the product of our advanced brains, which are, of course, products of evolution. And those brains have helped us to become much more than the “pathetic” lot we supposedly evolved to be.
I’m not even talking about creationists here; I’m talking about folks who should, and for the most part do, know better. Evolution doesn’t get to win by default any more than ID gets to win when we encounter something that cannot yet be fully explained by evolutionary processes. Evolution wins because it does a better job of describing the current diversity of life better than any other option. Just because an organism appears badly designed or flawed doesn’t mean “it must have evolved” any more than ignorance about particular events or mechanisms means “God did it”. It’s just as logically sloppy as “God did it”, and those who understand evolution should be more than capable of arguing for evolution on its own merits, rather than as a default position.
But imperfections are predicted by evolution, but must be explained by post hoc methods (like the fall) by IDers, or at least the IDers who really mean the designer is god.
Seconded. While I’ve never given birth myself, I can’t imagine that having one of the most sensitive clusters of nerves in my entire body included in part of that process would be pleasant. There are certainly many systems in the human body that are less than optimal, but I find the placement of the clitoris to be just peachy, personally.
I seriously doubt there is any 1 optimal solution for all of the varied environments we find ourselves, let alone perfection.
You need to consider the following when thinking about “optimal”:
The multitude of environments over time/geography/chemical composition/etc. we have existed in
The numerous situations a person can be found in within their lifetime
Any change whatsoever can have consequences that show up as you move to a slightly different environment.
I don’t think we have enough information to properly predict that a change beneficial while in one environment won’t have unintended consequences in a different environment. Therefore I don’t think you could say which changes would be “more” optimal.
Good points. The creationist view is that god made immutable species, changing during the flood and from sinning. I’ve never heard a straight answer from ID proponents as to when the design was done. If the designer designed a perfect one celled animal, the situation is practically identical to evolution. If the designer continually fiddles, then we should see a somwhat optimal design as of the last fiddling.
However we do have features, like the blind spot, which I think are hard to explain by being parts of an optimal design ever. A good enough design, sure.
Behe accepts that his ID needs to include evolution, but I think most of his supporters don’t.
That was a manager’s idea, not an engineer’s. ( back atcha!)
Sure we do. Homo sapiens sapiens has been in production for tens of thousands of years. We have junkyards full of them and the only changes per model year have been things like choice of color. The claims that humans used to live vastly longer have as much evidence as the claims of the proponents of the Fish carburetor. The barely adequate version you see in the mirror IS the “real” version.
Argumentum ad populum. GM sold millions of Chevettes around the world and they served their purpose of getting people to and from work, but that doesn’t mean they weren’t POS automobiles.
You really should know better than to say that, Finchie, me boyo! Your posture is a natural consequence of walking upright. Your poor posture is a natural consequence, too, because walking and sitting upright for an extended period are relatively difficult with our suboptimal design.
Beats “we suck because God had a 3-martini lunch before designing us.”
There is a big difference between individuals using a body to survive vs GM’s enviable position of being able to produce POS autos and remain in business.
I’m in the middle of an ID debate on another board at the moment. ID(ism) claims to have methods that can be mechanically and dispassionately applied in order to determine whether or not something was or was not designed by an intelligent agent. However, I’ve yet to see anything approaching a convincing demonstration of such methods - What seems to happen most of the time is that they say they’re applying the method, when in fact they’re just handwaving in order to arrive at the result they’ve already decided is correct.
In one case, I described a system that would accept randomised inputs and sort them reliably into strict ascending order of magnitude - I couldn’t elicit any judgment on whether or not I might be describing a designed system - all I got was one after another fishing attempt to try to find out the exact identity of the system I was describing, even though this would add nothing at all to the question - as I had already described what it does.
When I finally caved and said that the system is Chesil Beach in Dorset(UK) - where an 18-mile-long peninsular beach is very conspicuously sorted from fine pea shingle at one end, to chunky boulders at the other, all by the action of the waves - the answer was immediately forthcoming. And the answer was of course, it’s not designed! - It’s not ‘complex enough’. It’s not ‘specified enough’. Except no analysis had actually taken place - the method was just a sham, used to reassure people of what they have already decided. The method was not even used.
In fact Dembski’s ‘specified complexity’ idea contains a glaring logical contradiction (amongst its other flaws*); he wants to be able to infer design without saying anything, or knowing anything about the designer, arguing that if a system is ‘specified enough’ and ‘complex enough’, then it can’t have arisen randomly. Trouble is, he’s trying to turn ‘specified’ into a general term. You can’t. You can’t say something is specified unless you are able to say by whom or by what it is specified - specified can’t ever be a general term.
*The ‘enough’ thing - which is arbitrary, and the means by which complexity is measured, which I’ve never seen done with any kind of rigour or formal method whatever.
I’d be genuinely excited by the prospect of a generic thinking tool that we could mechanically apply and discern ‘designed’ or ‘not designed’, but there really doesn’t seem to be any such thing. It’s argued that forensic science and archaeology use methods for detecting design, but they’re only able to do so because they know something about the nature of the entities that may or may not have been involved.
Well, the supposed Intelligent Designer would have been both engineer and manager. And who’s to say He didn’t plan for obsolesence? After all, if everyone lives for a couple centuries, you have fewer bodies around. Fewer bodies means fewer voices for His Heavenly Choir, once He gets around to smiting the lot of us for good. Shorter life-spans = more bodies = more voices, and a well-fed ego!
OK, first off, you know and I know that evolution is the way things went down. I am not, in any way, shape or form trying to argue otherwise. My argument is simply that the logic of “we suck, therefore we evolved” is flawed. It is logically equivalent to “we don’t know how this evolved, therefore God did it”. The end result being that you cannot point to our design (or the design of any other organism) and thereby conclude that God logically must or must not exist.
My point here was that IF (a big, unproven, unsubstantiated, unfalsifiable IF, mind you) we were built as the Bible describes, then IDists have plenty of outs as far as reasons why we are the way we are (ad hoc though they may be). Essentially, they all boil down to “we suck (in the biological sense of being imperfectly pieced together) because we suck (in the sense that we disobeyed God, and, well, that, to them, sucks)”. Even so, God, if He exists, may very well have been a poor designer (despite what the Bible, or IDists, may say), but He still would have been a designer; again, you can’t really tell one way or another.
This really just illustrates my point that, logically, imperfection is not proof of lack of intelligent design. The intelligent designers at Ford and GM designed Pintos and Chevettes. Sure, they could have designed better cars, but they didn’t, for a variety of reasons. But just because those cars were POS’s doesn’t mean they weren’t designed.
But really, my point there was not address things from the ID side, but rather the evolution side. Regardless of how we perceive our design, it is the result of millions of years of trial and error, of selections for and against, and in the end, one cannot deny our evolutionary fitness. The human population simply would not have grown to the size it has if we were truly so broken down and stupidly designed as the OP seems to think. We are generalists, therefore we have not adapted to any particular environment, therefore we appear less well-designed than, perhaps, do specialists. But really, being able to be such consummate generalists in the first place represents quite a triumph of evolutionary design.
And that whole “sitting upright” thing is largely a consequence of our not having evolved to sit in a cubicle and stare at a computer screen or shuffle paperwork around for several hours a day. We force ourselves into these uncomfortable positions for extended periods; it has little to do with the way we were built. In essence, it could possibly be argued that we are using the product in a manner not prescribed by its labelling, and the manufacturer is therefore not responsible for any damage thereby caused.
As would I. There may well come a time when we need to be able to distinguish between a naturally-occurring virus or disease and a man-made one. Could also prove useful for planetary explorations.
It truly suprises me that none of these alleged processes for deciphering design has been pointed at any of the various domesticated organisms (assuming these tools really worked as advertised). Since they were designed, it should be a slam dunk to compare, say, a domestic sheep to a wild one and explicitly state which aspects of the former clearly demonstrate a guiding hand. Of course, they can’t because the tools they claim are really composed of smoke and mirrors.
Not precisely equivalent. And I read the OP as saying, “If we were designed the designer was imperfect, which is not something one would expect from a Supreme Being,” which you seem to agree with. And I suppose the Chevette analogy would’ve been better as the Volkwagen Original Beetle analogy since there are a few people who insist that quirky, imperfect car was the Greatest Car Evah.
Has anybody taken it that far, at least in the negative? Sure, one could say that it suggests that Intelligent Design was unlikely but this engineer/anthropologist (both just sorta) can barely be pushed far enough out on a limb to say the Sun will probably rise tomorrow, much less give a definite yes/no answer. (I’m not enough of an engineer to make the geeky, “it doesn’t really RISE” argument but my eqivocation drives my non-engineer bosses crazy. “Yes or no–will it work?” “Probably. I have every confidence.”)
And as an engineer I admire the amount of [del]slop[/del] adjustability they design into their arguments.
But that’s just crazy talk and worthy of our derision.
Of course.
And my point is that, if they were designed, rather than the random coming together of bits and pieces from the Ford or GM international parts shelves, they were not designed well and only the most delusionally Panglossian can argue otherwise. The BS about the imperfections coming about as a result of our sins is just that, BS, made up to keep their theories on the road a little longer.
Yes, I will admit that. By the evolutionary yardstick we are a success because, on average, we manage to stay in one piece through the last page of the payment book. It’s a low bar for a design but it’s the same bar any other creature needs to get over and we do jump it.
blinking But you just said we are “generalists.” A generalized design by a perfect designer would have no compromises.
It’s not mathematically possible for the design to have no compromises. The best you could do is the optimally fewest number of compromises given the set of conditions to support with the generalized design.
God’s a hacker and the Universe is a late-night kludge. In fact, it’s currently running on a KA-10 under ITS. Eventually, some bright undergrad will wonder what that filing cabinet is doing with a ‘TV typewriter’ hooked to it, purge the TECO Q-registers that contain all of existence by hitting random keys, and wipe the Universe. We’ll be resurrected from a tape backup a few years later and run by nostalgic geeks on commodity white-boxes also running SCP* and pirated copies of VAX/VMS.
*In the words of Joker:
“Who’s the breeder of the crud that mangles you and me?/I-B-M J-C-L M-O-U-S-E!”
back atcha!)
Your posture is a natural consequence of walking upright. Your poor posture is a natural consequence, too, because walking and sitting upright for an extended period are relatively difficult with our suboptimal design.