THE OTHER ID: INCOMPETENT DESIGN

From Seed courtesy of the Daily Kos:

The thing that perhaps is closest to all of us is our own skeleton, and there are certainly all kinds of stupidity in our design. No self-respecting engineering student would make the kinds of dumb mistakes that are built into us.

All of our pelvises slope forward for convenient knuckle-dragging, like all the other great apes. And the only reason you stand erect is because of this incredible sharp bend at the base of your spine, which is either evolution's way of modifying something or else it's just a design that would flunk a first-year engineering student.

Look at the teeth in your mouth. Basically, most of us have too many teeth for the size of our mouth. Well, is this evolution flattening a mammalian muzzle and jamming it into a face or is it a designer that couldn't count accurately above 20?

Look at the bones in your face. They're the same as the other mammals' but they're just squashed and contorted by jamming the jaw into a face with your brain expanding over it, so the potential drainage system in there is so convoluted that no plumber would admit to having done it!

So is this evolution or is this plain stupid design?

Click here for the rest.

While I'm sympathetic to the concept of intelligent design, which I also believe has no business being in any sort of science classroom, this guy raises some very good points. God, who by definition is all powerful, could have easily done a much better job of designing, well, everything. I'm sure that the standard fundamentalist response would be to fall back on the old "we can't understand God's logic" which is, to say the least, an unsatisfying explanation. When it comes down to it, I guess I don't really see any intelligence in the "design" of the universe, myself. Evolution, cosmology, and other scientific fields do quite a good job of explaining how matter and energy behave according to certain principles: the universe in which we currently live is clearly the result of all this. I suppose that my own belief that these principles were determined by God, as opposed to numerous devine interventions throughout the eons, isn't quite the same thing as "Intelligent Design Theory." Really, when you get down to it, it's pretty much impossible now to have a serious discussion about the subject. "Intelligent Design," as a concept, has been hijacked by fundamentalist anti-evolution forces in order to further a creationist agenda. That's too bad, because I think there are some interesting philosophical lines of thought that could come out of discussion of ID, if only the discourse hadn't become such a joke.

$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$