Bad examples of intelligent design?

by gringojj 62 Replies latest watchtower beliefs

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  ballistic

  Well, surely the whole GM crop thing proves that things can be designed better by us. (supossedly)
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  FlyingHighNow

  Most of what passes for new rock and roll music these days.
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  tetrapod.sapien

  Most of what passes for new rock and roll music these days.

  LOL flying! it even makes me ashamed to be an evolutionist...
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  FlyingHighNow

  LOL flying! it even makes me ashamed to be an evolutionist...

  Hey, Tet look at the Is Bush A Good Prez thread? Another thing we agree on.
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  hamsterbait

  The human penis.

  To give it the chance to work you either have to spend hundreds on flowers chocolates nights at the opera diamond rings gold rings a house and pretty clothes, or refuse to spend one cent and end up with the clap...

  Rocking rodents have no such problem.

  Seriously though I would say the human eye, and the ability to believe that anthropomorphic deities are telling people to slaughter each other in his name (OH and their memories cause they can't remember how to pronounce it.)

  HB
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  tdogg

  HPV's? I mean come on creationists, whats the goddamn point of viruses (exept for the ones god uses to punish sinners of course)? I write this as I sit here tired from a night of no sleep due to a nasty cough (but then I am a sinner).
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  144001

  George Bush
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  doogie

  all the fun parts are next to, touching, or inside the most disgusting parts.
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  RunningMan

  Well, humans come easily to mind, since I happen to have one handy. There was a great article in Discover magazine (June 2004) that listed some of the vestigial remnants in the human body. Here is their list:

  PARANASAL SINUSES

  The nasal sinuses of our early ancestors may have been lined with odor receptors that gave a heightened sense of smell, which aided survival. No one knows why we retain these perhaps troublesome mucus-lined cavities, except to make the head lighter and to warm and moisten the air we breathe.

  A cross section of a skull from the collection of Matthew Cryer, a doctor and dentist whose Internal Anatomy of the Face was published in 1901, is housed at the Mütter Museum at the College of Physicians of Philadelphia. Cryer most likely used the skull to analyze the anatomy of paranasal sinuses, which come in four sets: frontal (in the forehead), maxillary (beneath the cheeks), and ethmoid and sphenoid (behind the nose). In animals with an acute sense of smell, the sinuses are largely lined by olfactory tissue.

  VOMERONASAL ORGAN

  A tiny pit on each side of the septum is lined with nonfunctioning chemoreceptors. They may be all that remains of a once extensive pheromone-detecting ability.
  

  EXTRINSIC EAR MUSCLES

  This trio of muscles most likely made it possible for prehominids to move their ears independently of their heads, as rabbits and dogs do. We still have them, which is why most people can learn to wiggle their ears.
  

  WISDOM TEETH

  Early humans had to chew a lot of plants to get enough calories to survive, making another row of molars helpful. Only about 5 percent of the population has a healthy set of these third molars.

  NECK RIB

  A set of cervical ribs—possibly leftovers from the age of reptiles—still appear in less than 1 percent of the population. They often cause nerve and artery problems.

  THIRD EYELID

  A common ancestor of birds and mammals may have had a membrane for protecting the eye and sweeping out debris. Humans retain only a tiny fold in the inner corner of the eye.

  DARWIN’S POINT

  A small folded point of skin toward the top of each ear is occasionally found in modern humans. It may be a remnant of a larger shape that helped focus distant sounds.

  SUBCLAVIUS MUSCLE

  This small muscle stretching under the shoulder from the first rib to the collarbone would be useful if humans still walked on all fours. Some people have one, some have none, and a few have two.

  PALMARIS MUSCLE

  This long, narrow muscle runs from the elbow to the wrist and is missing in 11 percent of modern humans. It may once have been important for hanging and climbing. Surgeons harvest it for reconstructive surgery.

  MALE NIPPLES

  Lactiferous ducts form well before testosterone causes sex differentiation in a fetus. Men have mammary tissue that can be stimulated to produce milk.

  ERECTOR PILI

  Bundles of smooth muscle fibers allow animals to puff up their fur for insulation or to intimidate others. Humans retain this ability (goose bumps are the indicator) but have obviously lost most of the fur.
  

  APPENDIX

  This narrow, muscular tube attached to the large intestine served as a special area to digest cellulose when the human diet consisted more of plant matter than animal protein. It also produces some white blood cells. Annually, more than 300,000 Americans have an appendectomy.
  

  BODY HAIR

  Brows help keep sweat from the eyes, and male facial hair may play a role in sexual selection, but apparently most of the hair left on the human body serves no function.

  PLANTARIS MUSCLE

  Often mistaken for a nerve by freshman medical students, the muscle was useful to other primates for grasping with their feet. It has disappeared altogether in 9 percent of the population.

  THIRTEENTH RIB

  Our closest cousins, chimpanzees and gorillas, have an extra set of ribs. Most of us have 12, but 8 percent of adults have the extras.

  MALE UTERUS

  A remnant of an undeveloped female reproductive organ hangs off the male prostate gland.

  FIFTH TOE

  Lesser apes use all their toes for grasping or clinging to branches. Humans need mainly the big toe for balance while walking upright.

  FEMALE VAS DEFERENS

  What might become sperm ducts in males become the epoophoron in females, a cluster of useless dead-end tubules near the ovaries.
  

  PYRAMIDALIS MUSCLE

  More than 20 percent of us lack this tiny, triangular pouchlike muscle that attaches to the pubic bone. It may be a relic from pouched marsupials.

  COCCYX

  These fused vertebrae are all that’s left of the tail that most mammals still use for balance and communication. Our hominid ancestors lost the need for a tail before they began walking upright.

  The exposed tailbone of a male pelvis from the collection of 19th-century anatomist George McClellan rests on a humble seat at the Mütter Museum. The human coccyx is highly variable but is generally composed of three to five vertebrae. On rare occasions, infants are born either with no coccyx at all or with tails. While some have suggested that the coccyx helps to anchor minor muscles and may support pelvic organs, surgically removing it has no discernible effect on health.
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  Abaddon

  Ah, my favourate oxymoron, "Intelligent Design".
  

  Its self-refuting nature is entirely too obvious to bear much explanation.
  

  greendawn

  Getting extinct is not all down to poor design.

  This made me think of 'new intelligent design' for some reason.

  Building a better hominid... a meeting in the Creative department of heaven. (Michael The Archangel) Okay team, we got nowhere with erectus other than in the African market, although there is no doubt it was a perfect creation *ingratiating smile at the CEO* ... but careful consideration of key design features meant we could perfect the perfection we had already perfected *ingratiating smile at the CEO*, and basically hidelbergensis was a big sucess. But we can't rest on out laurels. The bugger's will never read and have bog-all ability to understand symbology no matter how inherently perfect they are *ingratiating smile at the CEO*. So before the big push into Europe and Asia to replace obsolete erectus populations with new, perfect humanity, we need to hit the market with a new homind. *celestial fanfare* Almighty God, fellow Archangels, Angels, Cherubim, Seraphs, and Angels, I give you sapiens! Smarter, more adaptable, and just look at the trouser department! (see below).

  georgefoster

  Ostrich wings may be a bad example of intelligent design, but it doesn't do much for evolution theory either. According to evolution, shouldn't an animal burdened with useless wings be killed off by more fit species.

  The operative word here is 'burdened'. I would say that the ostrich is not burdened by its wings to such an extent that the variation between the sizes of various ostriches' wings that naturally occurs is not great enough to provide 'selection pressure' favouring yet smaller wings. Nor do occasional mutations that result in smaller than normally possible wings.

  In other words an ostrich with the smallest wings currently possible with the genes coding for wing size will on average not have a significantly larger number of offspring than the ones with average sized wings, so their small wing genes stay at the same level of expression or representation in the population (assuming smaller wings don't get them predated more)..

  That's how natural selction works. It's not random. It is anything other than random. It is cold and calculating; that which don't work isn't here as it got et and didn't have any babies.

  The peacock is a great example. The male's tail is far more of a burden than the ostrich's wings. Most male birds in fact are easier to spot than the females, even if their plumage isn't an extra encumberance.

  Now, obviously if the appearance of the male was soley down to not getting eaten, it would look like the female. But there's other forms of natural selection; sexual selection for example.

  If females show a bias to certain charcteristics in males they mate with, those characteristics will over generations be increasingly expressed and the range of expression will move in the direction of the preference.

  In some species the females opinion isn't important; you get masive violent combative males who take the females they can by strength; that's why they are like that, as if their daddies weren't masive violent combative males they didn't get to be daddies.

  In peacocks, female choice was important. Over the course of many generations their preference for big tails meant that the tails got bigger, as the bigger your tail the more tail you got.

  WIth the 'hyper-stimulation' of large tails, the selection pressure was so extreme small tailed brown males might live long lives - but they'd probably only ever get laid once. By their mother. Big tail colourful males might get predated more, but on average in their riskier lives they would father more chicks, carrying their big tail genes.

  As to WHY females would prefer big tails, maybe the ability of a male to stay alive despite a uselessly large appendage is a indicator of the quality of his genes (but more about human males later). Those females who had that preference would pass better genes on to their chicks, and their chicks would be more likely to survive to breed and pass the mother's preference for big tails.

  Besides, the assumption is the wings are useless. Maybe an ostrich with wings (they are not vestigal, they're well musceled and strong) run faster than one without? Be a bit cruel to actually test it, but in additon to their use in courtship displays, I would wager they aid balance whilst running; humans use their arms, bi-pedal dinosaurs had tails, the reptiles that occasionally adopt bipedal postures have tails.

  You know what I think about stuff like this?

  It is quite stunningly beautiful. It is the face of 'god'. Seriously, the more you understand about evolution the more you will realise the beauty and strength of the basic theory, and how it can explain how things are in a very powerful way, time and time again. It makes such sense.

  As for human males; gentlemen. the content of your underpants is the product of female sexual selection. Ape dicks are skinny and short and have a bone in them. There is no reason why a penis shaped like that could not fertilise a modern woman. However, it seems many generations of females have prefered thick, long penises, and the morphological changes this caused in succesive generations lead to the loss of the oss penis . Whether this also means a large penis is an indicator of good genes (being able to survive despite a useless appendage) in general is off course something open to debate... Either way, it's official. Size does matter.

  Anyhow, I am glad you want to learn george. And remember, maybe god is so clever he knew it would end up like this and just set the balls in motion? Accepting general evolutionary theory is no bar to belief in god - indeed, it may be a better way to see god as it is, rather than as some bronze-age goatherd thought it was.