Show me the intelligence ...

Hi Mike! There's a number of bits of his handiwork I'm quite fond of -- have I mentioned them to you? (I tend to lose track... See my website via my profile if not .) Since you know the IDer, and he's told you the how and why, perhaps you are just the chap I'm looking for to explain them?!Cheers, DT[This message has been edited by Darwinsterrier, 01-15-2004]

Heh! I’m quoting Hill (and Humphrey) in relation to biological ‘designs’. Which I don’t think you would consider simple. The argument is about organised complexity, so whether the universe in general is ‘simple’ is irrelevant! I’ll leave that hanging for a bit so that Quetzel can have a chuckle... Dung beetle taste buds? Wow, thanks Mike, I’m not too up on beetles (your creator had too great a fondness for them for me to have kept track ), but I’ll have to look into those! Makes sense though that they could tell bad dung from... ‘seriously good shit’...DT

Not in the slightest, Mike... It’s a reference to what (I gather) certain recreational psychoactive substances are sometimes called. I had an interesting image of stoned beetles in mind.Though the word is ‘turd’... I’d try, if you’d not Pokemon-evolved into Brad... whatcha onabaht, mate?DT

You are, of course, perfect, Mike . It's the rest of us, with our appendixes, coccyxes, retinas, voice-box nerves, knees, epiglottises, wisdom teeth etc that are buggered!But that's to jump the gun... Firstly, perhaps you could define your IDer please? By which I mean, are we talking yer basic omnipotent, omniscient etc single god? I need to ask, cos there are other possibilities, which my examples are powerless against.Cheers, DT

Ah, I see. Well that's me stumped. See you Sunday!Gosh, let's see... maybe there were dung beetles (or insects doing that sort of 'job') in the Jurassic? Insects had been around since the Carboniferous at least.Maybe bacteria just broke it down like they still do?Maybe there was no more poo then than now: a given area of land can only produce a certain amount of plant matter, and it doesn't matter whether that's eaten by 500 one-ton cows or 5 100-ton Argentinasauruses. Roughly the same amount of crap will come out at the (other) end. So what's so special about dinos?I guess you're saying that the seabed should be miles deep in fish-crap. Ho hum. I thought you meant you were tired. "... and emotional", probably. Ah well, there goes my argument then. Cos there’s bits of the bible that suggest that the god in question is neither omnipotent (eg Judges 1:19, Mark 6:5) nor omniscient (Genesis 3:8, 18:20-21, Hosea 8:4, etc). So he could indeed be the creator who’s apparently responsible for all the clumsy, foolish and downright stupid designs we find in nature. Fair enough!DT

Um... he said it was good. Okay. By what criterion of design does ‘good’ encompass wasteful, pointless, excessively convoluted, less effective than other designs he knew of, dangerous to its owner, and plain bloody stupid?Please explain what is ‘good’ about the position of the marsupial birthing canal. What’s ‘good’ about a beetle having wings when it lives entirely on the ground -- wings that cannot work because they are sealed in under the wing covers, and which would not work anyway because they are too rudimentary? What’s ‘good’ about having external testicles?This is obviously some strange definition of the word 'good' I wasn’t previously aware of. Please tell us what dictionary god -- and yourself -- were using.TTFN, DT

There's a variety of related points here.Firstly, the obvious one: why can’t sperm be made at body temperature? After all, females make eggs inside their bodies just fine, so it’s not like there’s some intrinsic biochemical process that’s temperature-dependent in gametogenesis. Even if an external set-up were in some way unavoidable, they could still be protected -- a shield of cartilage, perhaps? But it seems very improbable that they do have to be external from a design point of view: not only mammalian females, but males of most animal groups -- and even some mammals, eg whales -- have their gamete-making structures internal.Remember, the point is not, why isn’t sperm made at body temperature, but why couldn’t it be? Is god in some way limited in matters of sperm production?And the reason why a vastly intelligent creator should have had a crack at doing internal testes is that it leads to a bunch of other poor design features.

• It uses extra materials: more tubing, a scrotal sac with attendant muscles, blood supply, hairs etc.
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• It leaves the testes far more open to damage, dangling around rather than safely inside.
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• And most strangely, there is how they get outside the body cavity. They are formed inside the body. Why should that be? If they are required outside -- ie if there’s some design imperative for the above oddities, which I doubt -- why the hell don’t they form outside... or at least, outside the abdominal muscle wall? Because, forming inside, they then have to get outside. They move out through a gap in the muscle wall, the inguinal ring. This ring leaves a weakness, through which the bowel is liable to herniate. This can both strangle the bowel and cut off the blood supply to the testicles. This is not a Good Thing .

Inguinal hernias apparently affect 500,000 people per year in the US alone. I can’t track down a percentage for how many people will suffer it at some point, but as a rough guess, across 30 years there’d be 15 million people, which I estimate is about 7%... and since it’s men, that’s 14% of the population. Call it one in ten, to be on the safe side. (I’ve also noticed some sites saying that inguinal hernais are more common in men than women -- anyone know why women can suffer from it at all?!)Now, there are good evolutionary explanations of why sperm might need to be made outside the body. But I do struggle to see how this can be even merely ‘good’ design from an allegedly vastly intelligent creator. Can any creationists explain it please?Cheers, DT

Actually, no. You answered the question out of context. The question was in reply to TruthDetector's

quote:

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Stop using 'flaws' in God's creations as an argument against him when he himself said, it was good.

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So the question was: in the context of God's "good" design, what's good about having external testicles? Sure, given that sperm might need to be kept cool, having them outside might make sense. But it was (allegedly) God himself who designed sperm in the first place! What's good about a system which leads to other problems? Having testes that need to be kept cool is not good design.TTFN, DT

Sorry, forgot about this thread... Which is irrelevant. The point is that it is ‘good enough’, which is all evolution expects. I would argue -- indeed, I am arguing -- that it is not good enough to be the product of a single vastly-intelligent creator-designer, working from scratch with each ‘kind’ (whateverthehell a ‘kind’ is).What say you?DT