Wednesday, February 23, 2005

The proven truth

How intelligent is intelligent design?

In mammals, for instance, the recurrent laryngeal nerve does not go directly from the cranium to the larynx, the way any competent engineer would have arranged it. Instead, it extends down the neck to the chest, loops around a lung ligament and then runs back up the neck to the larynx. In a giraffe, that means a 20-foot length of nerve where 1 foot would have done. If this is evidence of design, it would seem to be of the unintelligent variety.


Jim Holt pokes some holes in (and fun at?) the alternative to Darwinism.

(Via Collision Detection — see the comments there for further arguments and explanations.)

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

My mother always used to say that if there is a god, he is almost certainly male, because no WOMAN would have put the bladder directly under the uterus like that...

--R

Anonymous said...

Müzikdüde is certainly not the first to poke fun. As he is surely not the last to show that just because we can't wrap our minds around something, we deduce divinity must have prevailed over intelligence. I guess this is the logical approach for someone who is unable to fathom being on less than the most learned planet in the universe.

Anonymous said...

1st, on behalf of Muzik, I don't think he said anything about reasons to believe in Creation as much as the failed logic of the man quoted.

Jim Holt's quote doesn't discount intelligence of design, but only puts forth his inability to see the efficiency of that part of the physiology... to try to draw conclusion that intelligent design arguments are faulty. It's an ad ridiculum fallacy, essentially.
Muzik was just having a bit of his own fun by way of pointing that up.

...um but about that "unable to fathom being on less than the most learned planet in the universe" idea; you wouldn't be submitting any arguments on that plane...would you now?
(just some fun of my own;)

Anonymous said...

I just read through the entire threads of Holt and over at Collision. There are bloggers who do an excellent job of looking at this question from the Christian view, notably New Covenant.

These are theories on origin. Origin cannot be proved, only theorized, and it is entirely unfair to throw the entire thing into derision or into a purely theological court ( which today is the same as equating it with myth), when what is needful is to look over the theories as what they are: possibilities.
Taught as such. It is not accurate to pretend that there is factual support for origins- evolutionary or otherwise. Not so far.

wow. I'd like to say more, but this is comments...