Oolon Colluphid

But what we’ve got with the vertebrate eye is a sleek, wonderfully aerodynamic aeroplane, except for the flat disc surrounding the fuselage (imagine a large washer around a pencil), which means that there has to be a cone-shaped forward-facing aerofoil (like the collar you put on dogs after an operation to stop them licking the wound) in front of it.

The disc causes unnecessary drag, and requires the aerofoil to counterbalance that drag. You don’t have to be a rocket scientist -- or even an aircraft designer -- to see that if you didn’t have the disc, the unnecessary problem, you wouldn’t need the collar either.

Similarly with the eye, if the retina did not have a blind spot, which could be easily avoided as happened in squid eye design, there would be no reason for our brains to have to compensate for it. Squid eyes are in this respect the sleek aircraft sans both disc and collar.

Alternatively, if squid eyes would be better with a blind spot -- as is presumably the case, since we're the pinnacle of his efforts -- can you tell us why the designer left it out?

Can you tell us why he gave the nautilus a good pinhole camera eye but omitted a lens?

Why did he put eyes that do not work in creatures that do not even need eyes?

TTFN, DT

lpetrich

You people might find this evcforum.net thread interesting. I discuss in it how human designs often do not look like all-at-once, perfect-conception systems, but instead are built up piece-by-piece over time, complete with lots of kludges and workarounds.

And I note the resemblance of biological "designs" to such human designs.

One example I gave was how cetaceans eat and breathe. Their trachea is on the ventral side of their esophagus, while their nostrils are on the dorsal side -- the universal land-vertebrate arrangement. But their trachea extends into their nasal cavities, separating the food and air paths.

There are numerous additional examples that I had not mentioned; one of them is alternation of generations in plants.

Plants alternate between a haploid "gametophyte" (produces egg and sperm cells) and a diploid "sporophyte" (produces spores). These are similar-sized in mosses, but the gametophyte shrinks in ferns, and in seed plants, the gametophytes are microscopic, living inside of the sporophytes, which have become nearly all of the plant.

Seed plants still produce spores; those for male gametophytes are better-known as pollen, while those for female gametophytes do not leave the parent.

So plants have attempted to converge on animals, which are (aside from haplodiploid cases) essentially all-diploid, with only single-cell haploid phases.

If some designer wanted to construct seed plants from scratch, and wanted to make them diploid, he/she/it would have reduced their haploid phases to single cells.

Also, most vertebrates have sideways-pointing eyes. Some have forward-pointing eyes, but their early embryos have sideways-pointing eyes -- which move forward as the embryo grows.

There are also some cases of rather elementary mistakes, like the vertebrate eye having its nerves in front of its photoreceptors. This means that those nerves have to cross the eye's retina, creating a blind spot.

However, squid and octopus eyes have "correctly" placed nerves, suggesting that the vertebrate arrangement is unnecessary.

Oolon Colluphid

And so a loving god created phorid flies, tuberculosis, Ebola and Rickettsia prowazekii. Interesting.
Uh-huh...
So suggest one for eyes that don’t work in animals that don’t need them.
But most things are not random splatters. Intricate 'design' is manifest everywhere in living things. So given that so many things do work efficiently, please suggest why there are inefficiencies cluttering up things. What were the designer’s intentions in putting bits of pelvis deep inside a whale and of having a human coccyx composed of initially separate pieces that are vertebra-shaped? What was his rationale for the shape of the human appendix, and for giving non-functioning genes for making teeth and complete fibulas to birds (which have neither)?

If you say there are reasons other than efficiency driving these designs, then let’s hear ’em.

TTFN, DT

Wounded King

I think an awful lot of evolutionary biologists would wholeheartedly agree with me that intelligence is not a useful measure of evolutionary success. Intelligence may be a useful trait, that is reasonable enough, it may be the most complex product of evolution to date but complexity does not equal evolutionary success. The fact that humanity is not yet extinct shows that we are at least in the running in evolutionary terms. We are by no means the most populos species however, and since in simplistic evolutionary terms the fitness of a specific gene could be measured by its copy number our genomes do not have as many copies as a great number of organisms.

The concept of evolution is certainly not related to the concept of creation as in de novo creation of completely formed organisms, it is the very antithesis of it. If you mean that evolution assumes that life at some point arose, well thats hard to dispute. You would really have to define what you mean by creation in this context.

Principia

This is an argument from IDiotic terminology. Tell me how you can tell empirically that "natural forces" are "mindless." Tell me exactly what you mean by complex systems. And then tell me if you why the phenonmenon in the following pictures are either not complex or consequently intelligently designed:




Here's a hint to help you in your decision: we can't make some of these structures .

By the same logic, we have seen intelligent designers assemble simple systems (after all, I challenged you last time to explain to us why there'd be anything at all that was not intelligently designed, which you failed to respond to). We have also seen intelligent designers make tremendous blunders. We have also seen multiple designers working on the same design or multiple versions of it -- a phenomenon well captured in the Multiple Designer Theory. So extrapolating from these evidence: everything in the universe is designed, and there are many designers.

In other words, when you say this: I believe you are being either hypocritical of the ID model of inference or illogical. Take your pick.

Principia

Oh?

How about, stellar nucleosynthesis?

1H + 1H -> 2H + e+ + neutrino + 0.42 MeV
e+ + e- -> 2 gamma rays+ 1.02 MeV
2H + 1H > 3He + gamma ray + 5.49 MeV
3He +3He -> 4He + 1H + 1H + 12.86 MeV
...
12C + H -> 13N + gamma ray
13N -> 13C + positron + neutrino
13C + H -> 14N + gamma ray
14N + H -> 15O + gamma ray
15O -> 15N + positron + neutrino
15N + H -> 12C + 4He
...

Or how about the different electron orbitals (resulting from increasing number of electrons and higher energy levels): Because, as you know from chemistry in high school, electrons are such complex systems that they direct most of the chemical (yes, even biochemical) reactions in the universe. Are orbitals designed, Refractor?

Mageth

Refractor:

But until then, all you are doing is making unverified speculations of what you postulate would be "better design".
...
It is my faith-belief that the Intelligent Designer is the God of Christianity.

And all you are doing is making unverified speculation of what you postulate would be a "better designer."

No such god's existence has ever been demonstrated. Such a god only exists in the realm of theistic speculation.

Mageth

Refractor:

(ii) We have seen intelligent designer(s) assemble complex systems. Living organisms are complex systems, therefore, we have good reason to assume living organisms were assembled by intelligent designer(s).

So are the intelligent designer(s) themselves not complex systems? Is the intelligent designer "living"? If not an organism in the "classic" sense of the term, is the intelligent designer still not some kind of complex system?

Do you see where this is going? If intelligent designer(s) are required to account for complex systems, what assembled the intelligent designer(s)?

Ab_Normal

Side note:
I. Did. Not. Need. To. Know. That.

Mageth

LOL! Yes, the design of the human eye is sooooo bad!! That's why we have billions of humans that successfully survive and reproduce, having populated and conquered all of the animal kingdom and are currently ruling the planet. Yes, the human eye is so poorly designed that it is simply amazing to see how badly it has harmed human progress and survival. LOL!

I'll tell you what....you create your own flesh and blood human eye in the way that you think is "better designed", and prove through experimental evidence that it does in fact "function better" according to your design ----- THEN feel free to rant. But until then, all you are doing is making unverified speculations of what you postulate would be "better design".

This is, well, rather humorous.

We do improve on the "design" of the human eye. Ever heard of the various surgeries, corrective lenses, etc. science has developed to help correct the common inefficiencies and defects common in the eyes of us humans, including farsightedness, nearsigtedness, myopia, strabismus, amblyopia, cataracts, etc?

I was born with strabismus, which led to severe amblyopia (in spite of corrective surgery at age 3 and intense therapy thereafter). Therefore, I mostly see peripherally out out my left eye unless I close my right eye (and even then I don't see well out of my left eye). These days, they try to perform the corrective surgery at a much younger age, which is critical for preventing amblyopia. In addition to that, I'm quite nearsighted. So don't tell me about how great the design of our eyes are.

In addition to fixing the odd nerve arrangement, a better design would obviously include less of a tendency for such defects.

And you can add that I, like many other humans, suffer from frequent lumbar strain thanks to the great "design" of our spinal column (which is basically a "kluge" from the spines of our quadripedal ancestors).