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June 27, 2005
Humankind: An Imperfect Creation
In a humorous Op-Ed piece in the Los Angeles Times, David P. Barash, a professor of psychology at the University of Washington, provides the type of argument against intelligent design creationism that can captivate what I called in a previous post the muddled middle. Barash calls his piece, "Does God Have Back Problems Too?" Barash claims, I think correctly, that much of Intelligent Design Creationism is based on just the latest version of Bridgewell's belief in the perfection of the natural world.
Current believers in creationism, masquerading in its barely disguised incarnation, "intelligent design," argue similarly, claiming that only a designer could generate such complex, perfect wonders.
He uses two illustrations to support his contention that if there was a designer that designer was a bad one. One is the narrow and very dangerous passage that a human fetus must negotiate to emerge into this world. The other is the close proximity of the prostrate gland with the urinate system "that (the common) enlargement of the former impinges awkwardly on the latter" and the entanglement of vas deferens which loops around the ureter. Of the first example he says,
An engineer who designed such a system from scratch would be summarily fired, but evolution didn't have the luxury of intelligent design.
Of the second example he correctly opines,
. . .an altogether illogical arrangement that would never have occurred if, like a minimally competent designer, natural selection could have anticipated the situation.There's much more that the supposed designer botched: ill-constructed knee joints that wear out, a lower back that's prone to pain, an inverted exit of the optic nerve via the retina, resulting in a blind spot.
What I like about this article is that it touches on things that everyone has at least some experience with and puts this common experience in the context of the debate over evolution. In other words, just as the creationists use naive intuition to support their view, Barash attempts to build intuition that there are easily understandable grounds for the scientific position.
Evolutionblog directs our attention to another good article in the Boston Globe on intelligent design creationism, but from a very different but equally valid prospective. Following link to this "False Science." The problem with the Boston Globe article is that, while very clear and accurate, it correctly accuses the general population of ignorance of biology without trying to educate them. It does suggest that institutions like the National Museum of Natural History should actively take on that role. With that I couldn't agree more.
Posted by Duane Smith at June 27, 2005 3:00 PM | Read more on Evolution |
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