Darwin FishThere is something that troubles me deeply — fortunately it does not seem to have hit Australia yet. In more and more American communities (to take a well-known example), schools are being pressured from both outside and within to teach intelligent design as an alternative to evolution within the science classroom. Proponents of intelligent design would contest evolution’s status, suggesting it is only a “theory” — which is incorrect — or that it has plenty of holes and doesn’t explain everything. Some would go so far as to equate intelligent design and evolution as simply two different views that should be given equal time and treatment. While we don’t have nearly the same push in Australia, the strength of these views in some communities worries me.

I don’t want to spend time pushing the many arguments for evolution since there are many great resources on it, and I’m sure many would have heard these arguments before. I will say though that many of the arguments against evolution stem from a complete ignorance about the science behind it, and it’s hard to debate with someone who understands nothing about a concept. If you are interested in reading about evolution, there is a list of good books at the end of this post.

Instead, I want to talk about intelligent design itself. For many proponents of the concept, they would look at the world around us — it’s beauty, majesty, and intricacy — and declare the only possible way it could have come about is by design, in whatever form that may entail given personal or religious beliefs. This implies a conscious process, guided by some omnipotent being.

The ironic part of this is that if we were indeed designed, the designer did a terrible job. There are countless examples of terrible design in nature, beneath the seemingly well thought-out and planned feeling the world around us invokes for so many people. It’s unintelligent design.

To keep this short, let’s look at a few examples in our own bodies. When males are in the uterus, the testes develop within the abdomen. They later move down through the abdominal wall into the scrotum — leaving behind two weak points in the abdominal wall, where hernias can form. In females, the birth canal passes through the pelvis, resulting in an impossible natural birth for babies with large heads. The face is also particularly poorly designed, and our flatter structure compared to other primates leads to poor sinus draining and crowded teeth — the dramas caused by incoming wisdom teeth are a testament to this.

The pharynx — a passage we use for both eating and breathing, also an important component of our ability to talk — greatly increases our risk of choking. The structure of our eyes — along with other mammals — gives rise to a blind spot that is not present in other animals. This occurs due to the fact that our retina is effectively backwards — the nerves and blood vessels lie on the surface of the retina  rather than behind. Also, the eyes have three more muscles than are required to move. Lastly, there are many nerves and arteries in animals that are simply wired poorly, twisting around strange places throughout the body — in the case of the giraffe, the recurrent laryngeal nerve is six metres longer than it needs to be.

Your Inner FishNeil Shubin is the author of Your Inner Fish, which describes the evolutionary history of our bodies, and goes so far as to explain the fishy origins of many of our current health issues — hernias, hiccups, snoring, and haemorrhoids to name a few. I haven’t had a chance to read it, but a summary article written by Neil was published in COSMOS Magazine, and a similar article was published online by the University of Chicago Magazine – I’d highly recommend having a look.

The notion that our bodies represent some sort of pinnacle, or were in any way planned, seems outdated to me — I also find it narcissistic. If we really were created in His image, then there are high chances that God at some point in his lifetime has suffered from chronic back pain, weak knees, haemorrhoids, snoring, and who knows what else.

Books on Evolution