Kevin Dorner

This was one of my favourite posts, and I think it's high time it made a comeback with the recent design arguments I have seen here recently.

I couldn't find it originally, so loaded up an archival copy and converted it back to UBB, then wondered about adding a few URL's to the relevant information to spice up the list and make it more "robust." This turned into a much longer project than I anticipated (don't they all) and it now has 117 web links to the best references I could find, and I corrected a few nitpicks and added a few things. I hope you enjoy it, and learn as much from it as I did in hunting down all the information. Some of the entries aren't as annotated as I would have liked, but I have exhausted my "time budget" for the present!

Thanks to Oolon Colluphid for the list, and for okaying my tweaking and reposting of it.

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The non-functioning eyes of cave-dwelling creatures which live in total darkness: hundreds of species, from fish (eg Astyanax mexicanus ) to insects (eg the Hawaiian cave planthopper Oliarus polyphemus ), spiders (eg Neoleptoneta myopica ), salamanders (eg Typhlomolge rathbuni ) and crayfish (eg Cambarus setosus ) ...
· ... and of burrowing animals, such as marsupial moles (order Notoryctemorphia) (no lens or pupil, reduced optic nerve), amphisbaenians and naked mole rats (Heterocephalus glaber).
· Whilst on eyes ... is it not strange that the creator, having given the nautilus an otherwise very good pinhole camera eye, chose not to give it a lens?
· The human post-auricular muscle, which in other mammals moves the ears to point towards sounds... the ability of some people to wiggle their ears being one of God’s lesser-appreciated gifts to us, of course.
· Haemoglobin, which has more affinity for carbon monoxide than for oxygen.
· The aquatic embryos of terrestrial salamanders, which live on the land from hatching ...
· ... and aquatic creatures such as sea turtles, which have to come onto land to lay their eggs.
· The lungs of snakes, such as blindsnakes and colubroids – one normal, one atrophied. Why waste material with the small one? More surface area could be available if the space the atrophied one’s non-gaseous-exchange tubing takes up were given over to a larger volumed single main lung – and this is what is found in other snakes.
· The pelvis, hindlimb and hindlimb claw remnants of pythons...
· ... and the pelvis and hind limb bone remnants of whales. Even if (as is sometimes claimed) they do have a function, why are the bones in question bits of pelvis and limb?
· Apes and humans requiring vitamin C in their diets. Not only can most animals synthesise their own; the great apes do all have the gene for this – but it is broken. And it is rendered non-functional by the same mutation in all the great apes. How kind of God to give people without adequate diets scurvy.
· The famous 'thumb' of the giant panda. Why is its 'thumb' made of an altered wristbone (the radial sesamoid) rather than the normal digit? If six 'fingers' are better than five for grasping, why do only pandas have this feature?
· The phenomenal waste of life in nature, everywhere you look. Oak trees produce thousands of acorns, and fish thousands of eggs, in the hope that a few will survive; hundreds of millions of tons of pollen are cast into the air (Genesis 38:9-10: wasting one's gametes was a serious enough sin -though almost everything was in Yahweh’s eyes in those days- for Onan to be killed in punishment, yet the Good Lord is supposed to have created things which by their nature spill so much seed on the ground?); approximately half of human pregnancies fail or spontaneously miscarry in the first trimester; male elephant seals battle so furiously for females that great numbers of them die of bloody wounds; when a male lion takes over a pride, it will usually kill the cubs of the previous top male; the boom and (catastrophic for the individuals) bust of lemming populations...
· Flowers on plants such as dandelions, which are apomictic (asexual) and thus do not need to attract pollinating insects. Many apomictic species also continue to produce pollen, which may trigger reproduction, but its genetic contribution is not used and is thus wasted.
· The non-functional stamens (male parts) in some female flowers, or non-functional pistils (female parts) in some male flowers. Most flowers have both sexes of reproductive organs (stamens and pistils), some have only one or the other, making the flower male or female, but having both where only one set works is a waste of materials.
· Marsupial infants being born from the usual opening and having to wriggle arduously through their mother’s fur to reach the pouch and nourishment. Why not be born either more fully developed (like placental mammals) or even straight into the pouch? And why is such a set-up present in such diverse creatures as kangaroos, koalas and thylacines – and why are (were) they found only in Australasia?
· The foetal teeth of anteaters and baleen whales, which are made, only to be reabsorbed.
· The sometimes atavistic tails and gill bars of human embryos.
· The tails of peacocks, which are so long that the birds (which are a favourite food of tigers) can barely fly – just so they can attract females and ensure the survival of the kind?
· The tails of guinea pigs, which are present but which are so short (reduced?) they do not extend outside the body.
· The diet of ruminants is composed largely of cellulose, so why do they have to rely on gut bacteria and protozoa in order to digest it? Enzymes are readily apparent in animals to break down other foodstuffs. A good designer would surely have enabled them to break cellulose down for themselves – after all, ‘mere’ bacteria can do it!
· In a similar vein, the Chinese grass carp, Ctenopharyngodon idella, grazes on aquatic plants and, during floods, on land vegetation. It has specialised pharyngeal teeth that enable it to break up leaves, and so access the cell contents. So the creator clearly intended it to be able to eat these plants. Yet like most vertebrates, the cellulose itself and unopened cells pass undigested through the gut. If only it had the appropriate gut bacteria ... (Did God just forget the grass carp when he was giving out the bacteria? Well I suppose there are a lot of species, so he can’t be expected to remember everything.)
· The mammalian tidal respiratory system, which is less efficient than the avian through-flow one.
· The non-functional and reduced poison spur on the hind legs of echidnas (functional in the platypus.)
· Flatworms of the species Convoluta roscoffensis are green because their translucent tissues are packed with Platymonas algae. The algae live, grow and die inside the bodies of the worms. Their photosynthetic products are used as food by the worms, and the algae recycle the worms’ uric acid waste as food for themselves. The worms’ mouths are superfluous and do not function after the larvae hatch: worm plus algae plus sunlight is a self-contained unit. For what divine-design purpose do the flatworms have mouths, as other flatworms have? And just how useful would it be in times of hardship if all animals could make their own food? Some chlorophyll (or strategically placed algae!) would do it. But only plants have it.
· Cell organelles such as mitochondria and chloroplasts have their own DNA, which is inherited separately from the rest of organisms’ genetic material. Why should the code for small elements within each eukaryotic cell be inherited separately and differently from that which forms the rest of the organism in all its intricacy – the leaves, bone, teeth, eyes, antennae or brains? An odd design – and the numerous structural and biochemical resemblances between these organelles and existing parasitic bacteria are difficult to dismiss as mere coincidences.
· The twisted skulls of bony flat fish (order Pleuronectiformes); around 500 species including halibut, plaice, sole and turbot. If you are a fish and want to hug the contours of the sea bed, there are two ways your body can be flattened. The most obvious is front to back, laying on your tummy, as rays and some sharks are. Sharks are generally already slightly flattened dorsoventrally. Most bony fish, however, tend to be flattened in a vertical direction (higher than they are wide). No surprise to an evolutionary biologist, then, that those bony flatfish that do swim at the bottom are flattened sideways, and lay on their side. The problem with this is that one eye would always be pointing at the sea bed. They solve this by the skull contorting during development so that one eye migrates to the other side. You will notice though that their mouths are still sideways on. They are cartoon stereotypes of what a mutant should look like. How is this ‘intelligent design’, rather than design constrained by history, by the materials it started with?
· The human appendix. I’ll leave aside the idea that it’s vestigial, and simply wonder why, if it’s part of an intelligent design, it has no known function – other than to be a pocket for bacteria to get trapped in? It is common ( about 15% of everyone and about 7% of U.S. residents will be affected at some point in their lives) for it to become distended and blocked, so that the bacteria can invade the wall, leading, untreated (as it would have been for nearly all of our past), to potentially lethal perforation.
· The nerve ‘wiring’ of the mammalian eye, where the photoreceptor cells are in backwards, so the ‘cables’ are in the way of the incoming light, and have to exit the retina at the correctly-named "blind spot." Yet God got it the ‘right’ way round in the pinnacles of His purpose, the octupus and squid?! ...
· In the African locust’s (Locusta migratoria) wings, the nerve cells that connect to the wings originate in the abdomen, even though the wings are on the thorax. Nerve signals from the brain have to travel down the ventral nerve cord past their target, then backtrack through the insect to where they are needed.
· ... and of the mammalian larynx. The recurrent laryngeal nerve, rather than taking a direct route from the spine, instead passes down the neck, round the posterior side of the aorta, then back up again to the larynx. Which in the case of the giraffe, implies a creator so set on the mammalian Blauplan that an extra 10 to 15 feet of nerve is needed.
· Talking of larynxes, there’s the opening of the human larynx (leading to the trachea) being from the pharynx, so that swallowing impedes breathing (and vice versa). Not only that, but with the wind-pipe coming from off the food-pipe, there is a constant risk of choking. Before the Heimlich manoeuvre was invented, choking was one of the leading causes of accidental death; even so, thousands still die worldwide each year from inhaling their food. Children are more vulnerable because their airways are narrower. Great design.
· The plumbing of the urethra – a soft tube through the prostate, an organ prone to infection and subsequent swelling?!
· The human spine. Bipedal vertebrates usually carry much of the spine roughly horizontal, and balance it with a tail. Equally, a string of cotton reels with spongy cushions between is a good cantilever bridge type design for flexible quadrupedal running, but a lousy thing to stand on its end and withstand the compression strains of vertical bipedalism. (And why thread so important a feature as the spinal cord through the middle of this, where disc damage can cause anything from pain to paralysis?) Compression strains are best absorbed by pillars. If you want the pillars to be flexible, you put joints in them. In biology, we have examples called ‘legs’. The spine’s "design" thus results in back pain which causes over 149 million annual days off work in the U.S. alone, costing $50 to $100 billion in lost wages and medical costs, 80% of people being affected by back pain at some point in their lives, backache during pregnancy (extra weight pulling in an out-and-down direction it can’t happily support), and why you find, if you’ve ever "slipped" (herniated) a disc that about the only comfortable position is on all fours.
· The human knee. Ask any long-distance runner or basketball player.
· The human coccyx. When the bones of the coccyx are larger and there's more of them, we call that sort of coccyx a tail. If a single bone is required, why does the coccyx start as separate ones that just happen to look like little vertebrae? Why is there an extensor coccygis muscle?
· Wings on flightless beetles. Numerous beetle species are flightless, such as
darkling beetles (Eleodes species), the Kauai flightless stag beetle (Apterocyclus honoluluensis), and many weevils (Curculionidae). Darkling beetles, for instance, are ground-dwelling and feed on decaying vegetation such as dead leaves and rotting wood. Females lay their eggs in soil, the larvae hatch, mature and pupate in soil, finally to emerge as adult beetles. Like most beetles, they have wings ... but these are sealed beneath fused wing covers (elytra), and so the beetles are flightless. For darklings, the fused elytra help conserve water; for others they are a better protection for the abdomen. Wings are obviously not needed for flight for ground-dwelling beetles. The question is, why is the shell on their backs made of wing covers, and why are there (often greatly reduced) wings beneath them?
· Vestigial wings (halteres ) on flies. Instead of two pairs of wings, flies (such as Drosophila melanogaster, the common fruit fly) have one pair and a pair of tiny halteres where the second pair of wings would otherwise be. By "switching on" the homeobox Ultrabithorax (UBX) gene, they can be made to turn back into wings again.
· Wings on flightless birds. Maybe some species use them for something else, but kiwis (Apteryx, four separate species) barely have wings. Barely being the point.
· Blue-footed booby females lay their eggs on bare rock and build no nest, but the male still collects nesting materials and presents them to the female during courtship, as other species that actually build nests do.
· The homosexual stabbing rape reproduction in the bedbug Xylocaris maculipennis. Some bedbug and many other insect species make use of a ‘mating plug’, where once a male has mated with a female, the male seals her shut, preventing other males from mating with her. Some species have adapted around this by stabbing rape, where the male impales the female and bypasses the mating plug. In X. maculipennis, this has been taken one step further, where the male impales and inseminates other males, and the rapist's genes enter the bloodstream to be carried to females by the victim. In this way, the rapist conceives by proxy. A convoluted – and pointless – piece of design. (See: Miranda MacQuitty with Laurence Mound, 1994: Megabugs: The Natural History Museum Book of Insects.)
· All gastropod larvae do a 90 to 180 degree twist, so that the mantle, kidney opening and anus are sticking out over their heads. Which is an odd design. The really stupid design is the fact that slugs (subclass Pulmonata) and sea slugs (subclass Opisthobranchia) then do an untwist and straighten their bodies out again.
· Mammalian testes form inside the body, and then have to pass out through the abdominal wall to the scrotum so they can be at a more conducive temperature for sperm formation. Not only is that odd (why can’t sperm be made at body temperature?), but the process leaves a weak spot in the muscle wall. This ‘inguinal ring’ is liable to herniate, which both obstructs or strangulates the bowel and stifles blood flow to the testicles.
· The vast quantity of non-coding or ‘junk’ DNA: pseudogenes, introns, transposons, retrotransposons, etc. which does little for its owner except get itself copied. Pseudogenes, for instance, are chunks of DNA which have a resemblance to known genes that is too improbable to be coincidence, but which are not prefaced with a ‘start’ codon. Thus the DNA-to-RNA transcription system doesn’t know that ‘here is a gene to be expressed’. This is not just an idle observation: about 98-99% of human DNA is ‘junk’ DNA, not coding for any protein. For example,the Alu sequences are repeated some million or so times, and this one family alone accounts for about 5% of our DNA. (However, Alu might have a use after all but it would appear that this use developed after the Alu's appeared, because most living things do just fine without them.) In Drosophila fruitflies, 40% of the genome is taken up by three sets of so-called satellite DNA: pieces just seven 'letters' long, with no 'meaning', repeated eleven million, 3.6 million and 3.6 million times. Again, using more materials than are needed is not good design.
· One of my favourites: normally non-functioning genes for making hen's teeth, complete bird fibulas and separate tarsals, horse toes, and congenital hypertrichosis. What are genes for making these things doing in creatures that don’t need them, don’t normally have them ... and under creation never have had them? Just how ridiculous does a design have to be in order to refute creation?
· The genetic code itself. DNA has a remarkable copying fidelity ... yet mutations – errors – are far from rare. If the Good Lord wanted his creations to be separate immutable kinds, all he had to do was make the copying mechanism flawless. Meiotic recombination and outcrossing (sex) would still make different individuals. Hey presto – no evolution. But the system is flawed ... so God must ... want evolution? Even mere-mortal Francis Crick, co-discoverer of DNA's structure with James Watson, proposed a more efficient and robust comma-free code than the real one that living things use, before the real one was known; Crick's code design avoids frameshift mutations and has precisely as many states as there are amino acids to be coded for. Optimal... and no known life uses it.
· Sharks hunt, up close at least, by sight. Greenland sharks (Somniosus microcephalus), however, are nearly all blind, due to the presence of parasitic copepods (a subclass of crustaceans) that feed on the skin of their eyes. The sharks benefit because the copepods are bioluminous, and by their wriggling attract other fish which the sharks then snap up. But where is the intelligent design in such a complex set-up, and why does the shark need eyes if they are going to be parasitised to blindness as part of the design? There are other more straightforward ways to lure fish with a bait, as anglerfish (order Lophiiformes – about 210 different species of them) show, rather than first having eyes, then having them go blind.
· Fake sex in parthenogenic species: whiptail lizards of the genus Cnemidophorus have only females. An individual’s fertility increases when another female lizard engages in pseudomale behaviour and attempts to copulate with it. These lizards’ nearest relatives – oh, okay, the ones most similar to them in geography, genetics, anatomy and biochemistry – are sexual species. The hormones for reproduction in these others are stimulated by sexual behaviour. Now, although Cnemidophorus are parthenogenetic, simulated sexual behaviour increases fertility. (Also see: Crews and Young 1991: ‘Pseudocopulation in nature in a unisexual whiptail lizard’, Animal Behaviour 42: 512-514; Crews and Fitzgerald 1980: ‘"Sexual" behavior in parthenogenetic lizards (Cnemidophorus)’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Science 77: 499-502.)
· The human jaw, which is too small for the number of teeth it holds, hence impacted wisdom teeth (third molars.)
· The hollowness of the bones of ostriches shared by flighted birds, but not in their legs, where strength is now a survival attribute that natural selection can operate upon. Ostriches also still possess the flow-through respiratory system that extends into the hollow bones, again, a flight adaptation that seems misplaced if the ostrich was "designed" as a terrestrial animal.
· Goose bumps (cutis anserina). Since humans (especially women) generally have little body hair, it is pointless having the same system of muscles (the arrectores pilorum ) and sympathetic nerves which in most mammals raises the hairs in response cold or fear. Come to that, if our skin is meant to be mostly bare, why do we have the tiny hairs (and separate muscles and nerves for them) that we do?

... and so on, and on and on ...

All of these are easily explained if designs are constrained by history, but are anything but indications of intelligent design. It is often asked: what use is half a wing? But here’s a use for half a brain: any human designer with one, starting with a clean slate, could do better than these arrangements.

It is worth bearing in mind what ‘intelligent’ really means in a design context. Manufacturing researcher and consultant Terry Hill, in his 1986/2000 book Manufacturing Strategy, notes that “any third-rate engineer can design complexity”, and goes on to say that the hallmark of truly intelligent design is not complexity, but rather simplicity, or more specifically, it is the ability to take a complex process or product spec and create the least complicated design that will meet all project parameters. Xylocaris maculipennis implies that, at the very least, God the designer has an odd sense of humour.

And it also depends on what one calls ‘perfection’. Under creation, living things would be expected to be each perfectly adapted to its circumstances. Yet the opening of the Suez Canal has led to a massive influx of Red Sea species into the Mediterranean (at a rate of ten new forms per year – and hardly any the other way). Many Mediterranean species are now in decline, and the native prawn is almost gone. Similarly, grey squirrels have driven the native red squirrels to near extinction in these isles in the 150 years since their introduction from America, and in their fifty years here American mink (Mustela vison) have caused a 30-50% fall in ground-nesting birds in Scotland and a “catastrophic” decline in water voles throughout Britain. (Preliminary Water Vole Report, Vincent Wildlife Trust; The mink and the water vole – analyses for Conservation, Wildlife Conservation Research Unit, Oxford.) “Unlike in the mink's own native America, our native birds and mammals have no natural defence mechanisms to deal with this predator.” (Government Inquiry into Hunting with Dogs 2000: Mundy: Submission on Mink Hunting.) There are countless other examples of organisms introduced by man to a region where they did not exist before out-competing the local fauna and flora, such as rabbits in Australia, and the devastation on local Galápagos fauna wreaked by man’s introduction of pigs, goats, rats, dogs, fire ants, etc. Thus, creatures designed by God to fit their circumstances are pushed out, even unto extinction, by more-perfectly adapted ones from elsewhere. How can that be?

Also, to quote Nesse and Williams, Evolution and Healing (1995):

That is a direct quote, except I’ve replaced ‘natural selection’ with ‘God’ (plus asides of my own). The point of course being that evolutionary theory can explain these things, as the authors spend the rest of their book showing.

Hope that helps.

Cheers, Oolon

Vanderzyden

I've been visiting with some nice folks over at the BC&A forum. It would seem that there are striking parallels between these "suboptimal design" lists and the lists of supposed biblical "<a href="http://iidb.org/ubb/ultimatebb.php?ubb=get_topic&f=51&t=000647&p=1" target="_blank">contradictions</a>":

-- Usually, such lists are quite lengthy. The aim appears to be intimidation.
-- There is often no demonstration of the specific difficulties with the subject of the inquiry. Many times this is because the presenter does not have an adequate command of the subject.
-- Upon close inspection, it seems that common sense observations are either overlooked or dismissed. This would indicate failure to attempt the removal of presuppostional bias.

Perhaps this list is different. Let's begin, shall we?

The biggest dissappointment is that the first several links merely contain exhibits. There is no explanation. This is reminiscent of so much of the "evidence" for macroevolution. Few, if any, of the items on these exhaustive lists are accompanied by persuasive arguments.

Allow me to propose a more efficient method to discuss "suboptimal designs": The original author of this list could take two or three of the best examples and perform a detailed exposition. Even more persuasive would be to follow this with a critique--a critical examination of the exposition which considers the alternative explanations and demonstrates them to be unlikely.


Thanks,

Vanderzyden

scigirl

No, that's because both sub-optimal design and biblical fallacies both have a lot of examples.

scigirl

pz

In other words, you've got nothing to contribute but vanderbabble, and will whine for Y when given X, and whine for X when given Y.

If you have nothing of substance to say, please do not try to sidetrack this thread. Deal with it.

Blinn

Kevin Dorner,

That is a great post! And no doubt it took a lot of time! Looks like something for Oolon an you to submit to TO.

<img src="graemlins/notworthy.gif" border="0" alt="[Not Worthy]" />

Neruda

intimidation is purely a side-effect. there are plenty more examples than just the ones the listed above; the problem is that there's so much we COULD say, but that we rarely have the time or the space to say it in!

Besides, the truth can be intimidating for those who would rather believe lies; it rattles the world they create for themselves in which reality is whatever they wish it to be. *cough*CREATIONISTS*cough*

Doubting Didymus

Seeing as your idea of efficiency is to spawn a montsrous thread filled with whinging, evasiveness and irrelevant allegations of impoliteness, I think it is safe to assume that your proposed method for efficiency is completely bogus.

If you have nothing to add but demands that we phrase our arguments differently, then you may feel free to bugger off. Alternatively you might like to make an actual reply. Don't feel like you have to do all of them, just pick one or two and tell us why they do not constitute poor design.

You see, there is simply no need to explain in great detail why the examples constitute poor or inefficient design. Its blatantly obvious that detrimental vestigial features would be better left off that grafted on. If you disagree, why don't you damn well tell us why, instead of complaining that the point is not detailed enough.

I doubt that, even if we acceeded to your demands and did a detailed write up and evaluation of one or to of these, that we would ever see you respond to it. You are, after all, completely ignorant of all biology as you have demontrated beyond doubt in your other threads here. If you want to prove this impression wrong, then make a real post instead of dropping into threads to troll.

Now, do you have anything at all to say about any of the examples of poor design?

Vanderzyden

OK, let me try a different approach:

All of these examples are NOT examples of poor design.

Please demonstrate this statement to be false, with one significant, actual example.


Vanderzyden

[ October 10, 2002: Message edited by: Vanderzyden ]</p>

Doubting Didymus

Using your own method? Sure thing!

All of these examples ARE examples of poor design.

Please demonstrate this statement to be false, with one significant, actual example.

We could do this all day.

However, I will not. So what about asexual dandelions? to produce flowers is a waste, as they don't need them to reproduce, therefore the design would be better without them, therefore the design is sub optimal. Happy? Stop playing games and answer the questions.

Doubting Didymus

In fact, it seems that for a lot of the above examples that deal with vestigial parts, all that is neccessary is to add: "therefore the organism would be better off without it, therefore the designer could have improved the design by leaving it off, therefore the design is not optimal"