Design evidence # 231: taste buds

I think that sonnikke is making a big fat non sequitur about the inferred "designer" of humanity.That's because we could be the result of genetic-engineering experiments performed on long-ago apes by extraterrestrial visitors over the last 5-7 million years, which is something like what the Raelians believe.

quote:

---

Peter:
Wouldn't natural selection favour the emergence of
tastebuds? (on their usefulness for keeping their owners well-fed...)

---

That's right. And not only good-taste sensations, but also bad-taste sensations are useful; stuff that tastes bad is often poisonous or otherwise not worth eating.

holmes: (a sex fantasy...)sonnikke:
Wow, a clear demonstration of the utter moral negligence and de-valued thinking of evolutionary minds. This is exactly the kind of junk that belief in ToE produces...which then leads to pornography..which leads to child porn...which devalues lives of children...which leads to abortions...genocides..homocides...suicides...etcExcept that the Bible commands the genocide of those already in the Promised Land -- every single one of those people was to be killed.As to baby killing, let us not forget Psalm 137.And as to porn, read the Song of Solomon. If it is purely metaphorical, one has to wonder about its writer's taste in metaphors.All this was written centuries before Charles Darwin was born, so evolutionary biology was nowhere in sight.Yes, it is clearly a wonderful thing to realize that we are an "accident", we have no Maker, we are a product of chance...no different than the animals...what value has anything....Every one of us has two "makers": two human parents. At least until human cloning is perfected. My point basically is that BECAUSE we are able to enjoy food and drink, thanks to our tastebuds, and also defend ourselves against poisons, it points towards a Creator who WANTED us to do these things.A Raelian would agree 100% -- except for who's doing the designing.Now, you are welcome to see it any other way you want, but to me it is just another piece of evidence that suggests it was put there for a reason, and didn't just happen by chance and through time.Except that being preserved by natural selection is a non-accidental process.

(Holmes on sexual pleasure...)
Sonnikke: Amen brother! I agree. I believe sex (the way God intended it to be, ie. between a husband and wife) was specifically designed to be both pleasurable and functional..thank you for pointing out another piece of evidence of the hand of the Maker.Seems like our sexuality was misdesigned, because it ought to switch on only in a "legitimate" marriage, and not in "living together", civil marriages, marriages of other religions, etc. And we ought to be physically incapable of performing nonprocreative sex acts like masturbation, oral sex, etc. And homosexuality ought never to happen. All of this I mean not in a moral sense but in a physical sense.(Holmes on the sense of taste having appeared...)
S: Well, that's your opinion and you are entitled to it. To me it simply makes more sense that it was designed that way in the first place.Except that that argument could be made for any adaptation whatsoever.Sonnikke, how do you explain cross-purpose adaptations? Predators have adaptations for catching and eating their prey, while prey have adaptations for avoiding that fate. Furthermore, predator-prey systems can be more than one level deep:A deer eats some grass.
A wolf catches and eats a deer.
A flea bites a wolf.Grass leaves have phytoliths, tiny silica lumps that grind down the teeth of grass-eaters.Deer have big molars for grinding up the grass, and big fermentation-vat stomachs for digesting it.Deer can run fast to outrun wolves, and they have eyes and ears pointing sort-of sideways, because a wolf can come from any direction.Wolves can run fast to catch deer, and they have eyes and ears pointing forward, because that's the relative direction of a deer that they approach.Wolves scratch itchy spots, to get rid of fleas and other biters.Fleas bite through the skins of wolves in order to drink their blood.And I'm sure that grass plants like the "taste" of water and bound nitrogen and minerals, that deer like the taste of grass, that wolves like the taste of deer meat, and that fleas like the taste of wolf blood.I would say that the burden of proof lies on your shoulders to try to imagine a scenario for the appearance of tastebuds via evolutionary mechanisms.As opposed to jerking one's knees and saying "goddidit"?Not only do you have to account for taste pores, taste cells, supporting cells, connective tissue, and sensory nerve fibers, you also have to account for sweet receptors, salt receptors, sour receptors, and bitter receptors. Each located in a specific region on the tongue.However, "goddidit" is a poor explanation. Philosopher Karl Popper would say that it lacks "falsifiability", at least unless someone can show otherwise.Smell and taste are two different versions of the same kind of sense: a chemical-detection sense. And the earliest organisms undoubtedly had simple forms of this sense; internal versions of this sense are important parts of various biochemical mechanisms. Biosynthesis systems are regulated by their products; too much, and the systems slow down their production.And as to such details as nerves and taste buds, these are elaborations on multicellularity."There are no evolutionists in Hell"So Charles Darwin is in Heaven, getting to survey the evolution of life at first hand and wishing he could return to Earth to tell everybody what he has seen?