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Poor Design Choices

Creationists claim that life is more perfectly designed than could occur through a process of natural selection. But when one looks at the details of this "intelligently designed" life, there are a lot of design choices that simply make no sense. An honest view of nature without cherry picking reveals instead very often clumsy natural selection producing adaptations due to limitations and restraints.

Questionable Human Anatomy​

  • men having breast tissue - leads to breast cancer in 3,000 American men per year
  • Recurrent Laryngeal Nerve route - the path goes a long way out of the way for no reason. The reason was that the pattern was set in fish, and then as animals too different shapes, the topology remained the same.
  • poorly designed vertebrate eye - has the nerves running in front of the receptors leading ultimately to a blind spot for no real reason. The octopus eye on the right does not have this limitation; the rods and cones are logically placed so they receive light directly and don't produce a blind spot.
  • baleen whales that grow teeth as a fetus - and then lose them
  • Humans have genes for making egg yolk that are mutated into non-functional pseudogenes.
  • The outer part of our ears, the auricles, are held to the head by vestigial ear muscles rather than other attachments such as connective tissue. Remember that vestigial means loss of original function. What designer "designs" a loss of function?
  • People are born sometimes with a third nipple which makes no sense from a design point of view. Once again this is best explained by showing we are descendent from animals that had a line of nipples.
  • a study was published in 2023 detailing the finding of mutated pseudogenes that humans have for producing a full coat of hair/fur. The best explanation is evolution.
  • Goose bumps are created when a small muscle pulls at the base of a hair raising the hair and producing a small dimple (arrector pili muscle). In mammals with fur it can help with defense to make an animal look bigger. In humans the goose bumps are vestigial activations but still might help slightly with increased sensation. They sure don’t make you warmer or bigger looking.
  • At least 50% of our genome is derived from viruses or duplicated viral products and genes. All of this is consistent with evolutionary explanations and best explained through evolution.

Questionable Animal Anatomy​

  • The Kiwi bird - has vestigial flight wings. How does it make good design to put tiny useless wings on a bird that does not fly.
  • Many beetles with wings under fused elytra (coverings) over their thorax. And under these fused elytra some have no wings but some have wings that they can never use to fly. Why would a designer make beetles with wings they will never use?
  • Studies have found that chickens have the pseudogenes for making tails and also for making teeth and a stronger jaw.

Intelligent Design​

The appeal of intelligent design for the religious is often a result of motivated reasoning and confirmation bias, whereas for the non-religious it tends to be erroneous intuition due to a lack of adequate biological knowledge and testing for falsifiability.

Excuses​

Here are examples of some of the defenses that creationists give for these examples of poor design:

  • these designs are needed for other functions that we are not aware of
  • poor design can serve for warning system for things that happen rarely
  • even if it's an imperfect design it's still a design

None of these rationalizations can be tested.

Quotes​

"I think of a little child in east Africa with a worm burrowing through his eyeball. The worm cannot live in any other way, except by burrowing through eyeballs. I find that hard to reconcile with a notion of a divine and benevolent creator".

~ Sir David Attenborough (Loa loa, African Eye Worm)

Anatomical Flaws​

Take our anatomy, which is riddles with design flaws, many of which are the result of choices made in the past which locked in bad design:

  • Ankle ligament asymmetry means the lateral ligaments are weak and results in a tendency to sprain the ankle.
  • Blood vessels routing to and from our legs results in an increased risk of clots due to an artery pressing the left common iliac vein
  • Eye inverted retina creates blind spot, reduces resolution of image, increases risk of retinal detachment and blindness from retinal hemorrhage and diabetic retinopathy
  • Knee ligament asymmetry means weakness of medial ligaments predisposes the knee to injury
  • Proximity of trachea to esophagus increases risk of choking
  • Recurrent laryngeal nerve makes pointless trip down neck past larynx, loops under aorta then ascends to innervate larynx
  • Sciatic nerve pathway can be poorly rooted, causing nerve entrapment syndromes.
  • Long oviduct increases chances of ectopic pregnancy and death.
  • Embryonic fusion of pancreas from dorsal and ventral buds increases risk of ring pancreas that can strangle the duodenum.
  • Tight birth canal increases risk of fetal death.
  • Prostate encircling of urethra increases risk of urinary retention / obstruction with age-related prostatic hypertrophy
  • Venous plexus near anal sphincter predisposes towards hemorrhoids.
  • Sinus drainage is poor and increases risk of infection because drainage holes point for a quadruped anatomy.
  • Spine is not designed for biped but quadruped, increasing risk of backaches and herniated discs.
  • Human jaw is too small, increasing risk of impacted wisdom teeth.
  • Descent of testes to external posturing increases risk of cryptorchidism, inguinal hernia and testicular injury.
  • Yolk sac no longer serves its original purpose but still exists, leading to risk of Meckel’s diverticulum which can cause fistula, perforation and bleeding.

Simpler to Understand​

The whole point about the creation debate, is that if you are willing to accept "magic" (that is making something appear through supernatural means) then in that case creationism is far easier to understand and believe than evolution. You can stop asking questions, because asking "how" the magic was done is not an allowed question to ask. You don't need to worry about any messy details, like how did genders differentiate over time, because it is just "BAM it is all created".

At the risk of sounding dismissive: simpler minds appreciate creationism more.

More sophisticated minds appreciate the sheer beauty of a system that in the process of simply interaction with itself, produces amazingly varying forms of life. But to be honest, it is more work.

Nature does not need intelligence​

Why do creationists believe "intelligence" is needed?

It is because things that humans make require some sort of intelligence -- that is how humans create. All of your day-to-day household artifacts are created in this manner.

Walk into nature you find a completely different story. A tree does not need intelligence to grow larger: it grows all on it's own. A river does not need intelligence to cut a river valley, it does it all on its own. Bacterium do not need intelligence to consume rotting meat, they do it all on its own. A virus does not need intelligence to form a more deadly strain, it does it all on its own. I storm does not need intelligence to form out of nothing, it does it all on its own.

Nothing in nature needs intelligence. Creationists just think it does because their household goods are created that way.

Resources​