So let’s get out of the hot water with some humor, starting off with a kiddie joke:
Now for the grownup stuff:
Note the pedal extensions…
And speaking of extensions:
As the man said:
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So let’s get out of the hot water with some humor, starting off with a kiddie joke:
Now for the grownup stuff:
Note the pedal extensions…
And speaking of extensions:
As the man said:
Comments are closed.
Thank you Sir.
I needed that this morning.
I will never understand why religious types are so fond of citing the human eye as a miracle of design that proves the existence of a Creator. If a Creator is responsible for it, he or she is an incompetent engineer. My eyes have developed three separate disorders, any one of which would have left me blind if not treated: glaucoma, cataracts, and Fuchs’ dystrophy. Two of these conditions were corrected with surgery, and the third is controlled with medication. In other words, I had to rely on human medical science to fix the hopelessly flawed design that I’m supposed to thank the Creator for.
The truth is that my eyes are adequately designed by nature for an environment (the African savanna) in which I was supposed to live thirty years at most. My eyes developed those problems because I had the audacity to live twice that long. Mother Nature is a bitch, and she wants me dead. But if I insist on remaining alive, I’ll have to accept that the warranty is expired on every part of my body.
Add my aching feet, knees, and especially the spinal column to the examples of bad design. Contrasting the foot and spine:
One is a unique design, which at the weight of over 120 pounds that is typical for even a poorly fed and overworked man, is barely adequate for long walks on a soft tropical forest floor, and needs heavy artificial reinforcement and padding for any hard surface. If God designed this, he ignored many better prior designs, including hooves or scaling a wolf’s feet up or a bear’s feet down, instead giving us unique feet that require my wife to buy $300 shoes to be able to walk out of the front door.
The other is a poor adaption of a very old design to new requirements. The human erect bipedal stance is nearly unique in the animal kingdom, and I think entirely unique among vertebrates over 20 pounds. (Ostriches, emus, the non-bird bipedal dinosaurs, and large kangaroos all stand with their spine nearly horizontal, so the base of the neck and the anus are at nearly the same height. Only humans have the neck almost straight up from the anus.) But instead of a unique support system that would give us the little bit of flexibility we need without breaking down from overloads and age, we get something that was first created for eels and later adapted for quadrupeds.
If there was a Designer, he ignored proven prior designs for the foot because they came from other branches of the mammals, but for the spine he did not bother to invent a new design when the single old design became inadequate. That is STUPID. But this makes perfect sense for evolution. It was stuck with the spine because it’s in the entire ancestry from apes back to the first eels nearly half a billion years ago. It was 50 million or more years since the last ground-walking ancestors of humans and apes, so there were no genes left for a foot other than paws that were best suited for climbing around in trees, and evolution had to quickly come up with something new.
Another 50 million years as cavemen, and we might have better feet and better supports for the erect torso, as well as a brain that doesn’t become panicky and stupid in an emergency, and that reduces our appetite when we’ve grown big enough, etc. But once we reached a certain rather low level of adaptation to the brainy, talking, tool-using, and erect bipedal life, we rapidly reached a point where we continue to evolve culturally and technologically, but are able to keep the somewhat less-fit alive and stop physical evolution.