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Psycho
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Quote:
Originally posted by oldtimer
To say how a different body structure could disprove evolution (for me) is that the traits I described in my posts say that this could not be done by a single celled organism, alone. Though I have limited understanding of the concept of evolution, I don't see even over billions or millions of years how you can create something as sophistically complex as us, even through all that time arranging and rearranging itself to form a "human".
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These one cell organisms randomly developed parts that proved to be very useful. These modified one cell oraganisms survived pretty well so the trait was passed onto future generations. These one cell organisms randomly developed into a multi-cell organism. These modifed one cell organisms survived because they were well equiped. The multi-cell trait was passed on.
continue on and on and then you eventually get us. Existing traits mutated but were useful and remained. These new, jury rigged traits were passed onto future generations:
Quote:
Symptoms of jury-rigged design
Consider the following pieces of evidence supporting the theory that biological organisms are the result of trial and error, jury-rigged, evolutionary design rather than deliberate, "intelligent" design:
We were cobbled together from previous designs. Analysis of the human genome shows that every single piece of our genetic code is either a direct copy of other animals' codes, or a very minor modification upon said codes. Of course, by sheer coincidence, these animals just happen to be the ones that have been identified as our evolutionary precursors.
Dangerous design flaws. Because mammals evolved from the Devonian lungfish (Osteolepiformes) which swallowed air to breathe, we have inherited a respiratory system in which we use the same tube to breathe and swallow. A piece of food lodged in this double-duty windpipe can cause death! In real life engineering, the duplication of a dangerous design flaw from a previous design is considered an example of serious incompetence. In fact, if we imagine that an engineer had designed apes and then separately designed humans, he probably would have lost his license for negligently duplicating a serious, known design flaw!
Poor design aspects. For example, the human eye is wired backwards. Our photoreceptors face the wrong way, so that the side which connects to the nerve fibres is on the inside of the eye rather than the outside. This means that the nerve fibres actually "get in the way", and it also means that the eye has a hole in the back, through which these fibres must be bundled and passed through in order to reach the brain! This design increases the length of wiring for no good reason, decreases visual acuity, and creates a blind spot! A creationist would no doubt claim that God had a very good reason for doing it this way, but if so, then why did he design cephalopods (squids and octopi) with eyes wired correctly?
Failure to copy design corrections/improvements If a GM engineer discovered and corrected an intake manifold design flaw that restricts airflow for no good reason, it's a safe bet that this correction would make its way not only into future versions of that particular car, but every other GM vehicle which suffers from the original design flaw, irrespective of product line. However, the properly wired eyeballs of cephalopods were never incorporated into the vertebrate evolutionary branch. In other words, we share a poor design with all other members of our evolutionary branch. A better design exists, but only on another evolutionary branch! If this was the result of "intelligent design", then it begs the question: what kind of idiot would confine design improvements to a particular product line? Why don't humans incorporate the best design aspects of every animal species which preceded us, irrespective of evolutionary lineage? <Gasp!> Could it be that we have descended from one particular family of animals?
Poor manufacturing yields. Creationists take great pleasure in pointing out how precise our biological systems are. They love to cite, over and over, the fact that even the most miniscule alteration of certain parameters would cause the entire system to fail. However, any engineer familiar with basic quality control theory would consider such a design totally unacceptable. It is not "robust", meaning that it cannot withstand even the most minor alteration to optimal conditions. This leads to extremely low yields: out of millions of sperm in a typical ejaculation, fewer than 1,000 even reach the fallopian tubes, at which point half of them will go into the wrong tube. Only one will fertilize the egg, and the majority of fertilized eggs will not successfully implant in the uterine wall. Moreover, even successful fertilizations and implantations do not necessarily go to term; many pregnancies end in miscarriage, sometimes so early that the female may not even realize she was pregnant. We are talking about manufacturing yields below 0.0001%, people! By any engineering standard, this is awful! But by the standard of ruthless "survival of the fittest", it makes perfect sense.
Tendency to modify instead of add. Also known as "transformed organs". When a component of a design is modified to perform some new function at the expense of its original function, engineers generally describe the result as "jury-rigged". Nature is full of examples of such jury-rigging (eg. insect mouth-parts that used to be legs, dolphin fins that contain a full set of finger bones), but the best example is your arms. We have two arms and two legs because we are bipedal, but bipedal locomotion is ridiculously inefficient (for example, a typical dog can easily outrun a human despite its short legs). Worse yet, we are horribly inefficient runners even for bipeds (compare a human's running speed to the land speed of an ostrich or any other landed bird). Our poor speed and our lack of natural defenses make us easy prey for predators, so if not for our ability to make weapons, we would have been the footstool of the animal world. Even today, people are regularly killed by wild animals because they can't run quickly enough to get away. So why were we "designed" this way? Why would a competent engineer cripple us in this manner, rather than giving us four legs and two arms? This question is difficult to answer with "intelligent design", but it's easy to answer with evolution: we evolved from creatures with four legs, and two of those legs were transformed into our arms. The evolutionary advantage was presumably reproductive: we could carry food, so we could shelter our mates and our young in protected caves while we foraged.
Creationists open a dangerous can of worms when they suggest that we consider biological structures as engineered designs. Any engineer can examine the entire "product line" and see widespread evidence of massive, inexplicable incompetence. Dangerous, potentially lethal design flaws are mindlessly propagated through entire product lines, design improvements are mysteriously confined within product lines, manufacturing yields are horrendous, and every design has been cobbled together from previous designs, and new features are often jury-rigged from old ones instead of being added as genuinely new systems. Any engineer who takes a serious look at biological organisms from an engineering standpoint (as opposed to mindlessly accepting creationist propaganda about its "perfection") will have no choice but to conclude that there was no intelligence whatsoever behind it.
the source
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