So you think we are “intelligently” designed?

There is obvious evidence against such an idea operating in living creatures. The gut is supported by being enclosed in a big membrane called the peritoneum. The peritoneum is attached to the backbone. This is fine for a four footed animal, however, given an animal with an upright posture, for example us, the gut falls to the bottom of the abdominal cavity. The common outcome may be various types of hernia, prolapse of the uterus and vaginal wall and haemorrhoids.

The big maxillary sinuses or cavities are behind the cheeks on either side of the face. They have the drainage hole in the top, which is not much of an idea in terms of using gravity to assist drainage of the fluid. Ear, nose and throat specialists sometimes have to knock a hole through the side of the nose near the bottom of the sinus to help drainage of puss. Apart from horses, which have a very small opening, most four-footed animals operating with head down rarely get sinus problems. It would seem that knowledge of gravity has not been a strong point in the repertoire of the intelligent designer.

The digestive system of grass and herbage eating animals includes a large organ next to the secum, the vermiform appendix in which cellulose is digested. In the human it’s rudimentary, it gets matter caught in it, becomes inflamed sometimes causing sever peritonitis and death. Why the intelligent designer put it in at all is conjectural, unless in fact it is an evolutionary remnant from an earlier beneficial function.

One of the marvels of backboned animals is the eye. Indeed, Dr William Paley, a clergyman, whose writings were used to challenge Darwin considered it as the shining example of intelligent design. Paley likened the situation to that of finding a watch abandoned in an open field: it must have a maker who formed it for a purpose. The eye might be compared with a designed instrument such as a telescope, he concludes, ‘that there is precisely the same proof that the eye was made for vision as there is that the telescope was made for assisting it’. That is the eye must have had a designer just as the telescope had.

In considering the eye as the marvel, there are facts now known which were not known in Paley’s time, about 1801. In our eye and of all other vertebrates the optic nerve carries over a million fibres each leading from a cell in the retina. It is part of a system receiving data from about 125 million photocells. Whereas it would seem a designer would point the photo cells towards the source of light with the wires leading back to the brain, it would be poor design to have the photo cells pointing away from the light with their nerve processes departing on the side nearest the light. This is what happens in all vertebrate eyes, the wires or nerve processes have to travel across the surface of the retina to a place where they all go through a hole, creating what is called the blind spot, to form the optic nerve. The design principle is really not very good. The extremely interesting fact is that with the octopus the wires from the photocells don’t point to the light but do indeed go backwards. The octopus eye in this respect is a better-designed effort by the putative intelligent designer than the eye of mammals. How did this come about?

Well, Ernst Mayr, the great Harvard biologist argued that photo receptors in some form evolved independently some 40 to 60 times in animals ranging from worms, molluscs to vertebrates. In the octopus eye it is formed by an infolding of the surface cells on the head, which become thickened to form eye components and it is internalised. In the vertebrate however, the eye is formed from an extension out of the mid brain but with the lens developing from overlying skin surface layer of cells. The distinguished French Nobel Laureate, Francois Jacob stated that the evolutionary process is one of gradual tinkering over large or vast periods of time.

Nobel Laureate Professor Peter Doherty in his recent book, The Beginners Guide to Winning a Nobel Prize, (wonderful reading), avers that immunity does not seem to him something that is intelligently designed. He says, ‘We now have the sequence of the whole human genome and we can compare the genome of the fruit fly and the potato. We see there are great similarities, everything we know in biology agrees with Darwin’s Theory of Evolution in a broad sense. The theory is probably tested a thousand times per day in various laboratories. This is just the way science is done.’

Though it is hard to conceive that anything like it could happen in the US there are lessons from history on the dangerous outcomes when a non-scientific ideology is introduced into the curriculum. In the Soviet Union the belief in inheritance of acquired characteristics, Lamarckism, was applied over decades by Lysenko, to plants. But once the doctrine took hold others, politically adept, advocated that humans could be modified under the beneficent Marxist philosophy. It destroyed genetic science and also the Soviet agricultural system; widespread starvation was a consequence. The Soviet Union only retained eminence in science where the Marxist philosophy was irrelevant, for example mathematics and physics. It was the physicists like Kapitza and Sakharov who finished Lysenko.

I’ll post more on this later