Not so well designed

My blog this time is a salute to and an unofficial review of a book I’ve just read: The Not-So-Intelligent Designer: Why Evolution Explains the Human Body and Intelligent Design Does Not by Dr. Abby Hafer who teaches human anatomy and physiology at Curry College in Massachusetts.

Genesis Chapter 1, verse 27 says: “God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him.”  Despite any religious doubts, as one gets older and some body parts don’t work as well as they used to, one starts to wonder. Dr. Hafer’s book educated me in much more detail about various parts of our bodies that quite simply aren’t very well designed. And what I like is that she does it with quite a bit of humor, as well as giving some well-deserved digs at the so-called Design Institute in Washington state that is pushing hard for religious creationism to be taught in public schools based on their claims of the evidence for our ‘perfect design’.  

Many men are aware of the danger of getting hit in the balls while playing some robust sport such as football or baseball. We’re told that they can only produce sperm if they are cooler than the rest of our body. But many other mammals have them safely inside their bodies, e.g. elephants; and all male birds, who have a higher body temperature than us mammals, have them inside too, and they work fine. Poor design on our part.

I have difficulty swallowing large pills. Hundreds of people choke to death every year in America. Our windpipe leading to our lungs, and our esophagus leading to our stomach share a common area in humans at the back of our mouth/throat area. Not so with some other animals. This tricky set-up is the price evolution made us pay for our variable voice sounds. OK, I’ll enjoy the opera and be careful taking my daily prescription pills; but don’t tell me I’m designed perfectly in the image of God.

Even more serious is the difficulty and pain that women go through giving birth to babies which led to countless tragedies in earlier times. OK, so it’s the price we humans have to pay for our big brainy heads – I can understand that, but don’t talk to me about ‘good design’. 

Most of us have heard the phrase ‘survival of the fittest’. It was not coined by Darwin and has misleading connotations which led to the unfortunate term ‘Social Darwinism’ and the self-centered arrogance of a Donald Trump. It would be more accurate to say ‘survival of the fitter’ to describe evolution, because what evolutionary nature cares about is whether you’re put together sufficiently well enough to live long enough to breed, while meanwhile winning out in the competition for the best mate by being smarter and looking more beautiful.

While on the Brits, we are sometimes referred to in America as Limeys. This is a compliment as it has its roots in the fact that the British navy, as it explored the world and built the Empire in bygone days, discovered that if the sailors sucked on limes from time to time they wouldn’t get scurvy – a serious and often fatal disease in earlier times brought on by a lack of vitamin C. What I didn’t know till I read Dr. Hafer’s book is that many other animals, including cats, make their own vitamin C. And we have almost the entire biochemical pathway for making it too but, because of some mutation many moons ago, we lack just the last darned step in the process. Now no loving designer god would go to all the trouble of giving us this biochemical process and then, just at the last moment, say to himself: “I’ll make life a bit more challenging for him and leave out this last step”!   

Eyesight is a fabulous thing and I’m so grateful that I can see the beauty of my family and the beauty of nature and art, not to mention reading etc., etc. But, for all this our eyes are strangely put together. At the back of the eye are special cells called photoreceptors that when light falls on them send electrical pulses along nerve fibers to the brain, and we see. But, did you know that the photoreceptor cells – called rods and cones because of their shape – are in upside down, so that the optic nerves come out on top of the retina, run along on top filtering out some of the light, and then go down a hole on the middle of the retina in order to get back to the brain thus creating a literal blind-spot in all our eyes. If you believe in a creator god then he/she must prefer squids and octopi as in their eyes the photoreceptor cells are in the right way round.  

I don’t want any reader of this blog to go away thinking I’m just complaining. No! I’m very grateful for my body that has allowed me to do all that I have in a healthy long life. But don’t talk to me about perfect design. The wonderful truth is that all living things on this planet of ours – millions of species of animals, plants, fungi, amoebas and bacteria of all kinds – we’re all of us descended from a common ancient ancestral bacterial-like cell, and wouldn’t have evolved into all us wonderful creatures on this planet but for little mistakes in the copying process of our ancestors’ DNA that natural selection has worked upon over billions of years. This is the most wonderful and fabulous story in the world, and I love the fact that it has all played out, and you and I are here, simply because of imperfections.

Thanks Dr. Hafer.