Posted on 04/27/2008 2:42:03 AM PDT by canuck_conservative
"Oh what a piece of work is man," wrote Shakespeare, long before Darwin suggested just how little work went into us. Somehow, that same process that gave us reason, language and art also left us with hernias, flatulence and hiccups.
One argument scientists often make against so-called intelligent design the idea that evolution cannot by itself explain life is that on closer inspection, we look like we've been put together by someone who didn't read the manual, or at least did a somewhat sloppy job of things.
Viewed as products of evolution, however, our anatomical quirks start to make sense, says University of Chicago fossil hunter and anatomy professor Neil Shubin, author of the recent book Your Inner Fish. And by focusing on our less lofty traits, evolutionary biology can help dispel one of the most egregious and even tragic fallacies surrounding Darwinian evolution that it moves toward perfection, with man at the apex of some towering ladder.
Evolution of Hiccups
That misreading of evolution has been connected to the eugenics movement of the early 20th century, with the Nazis extending the man-as-ideal notion to blue-eyed blond German-man-as-ideal notion.
"Darwin didn't believe it, but some, who saw it through a more religious light, tended to want to interpret evolution as a steady march toward the pinnacle of humanity," says University of Pennsylvania ethicist Art Caplan, who has written extensively on the eugenics movement.
By today's understanding, evolution by natural selection doesn't march toward anything it just modifies existing creatures to better compete in ever-shifting environments.
Understanding something as seemingly trivial as the evolution of hiccups can help clear up some profound misperceptions on the nature of life and humanity.
The sound of a hiccup echoes back to our very distant past as fish and amphibians some 375 million years ago, says Shubin. It's really just a spasm that causes a sharp intake of breath followed by a quick partial closing of our upper airway with that flap of skin known as the glottis. It's best if you can nip it in the first couple of hics, he says.
It's much harder to stop once you've let yourself get up to 10. By that point you've reverted to an ancient breathing pattern orchestrated by the brain stem that once helped amphibians breath, letting water pass the gills without leaking into the lungs.
"Tadpoles normally breathe with something like a hiccup," Shubin says.
The theme of his book is that we owe much of our anatomy to our animal ancestors. "Parts that evolved in one setting are now jury-rigged to work in another," he says. "When you look at the human body, you see layer after layer of history inside of us."
The first layer is what we share with chimpanzees and gorillas. The next goes back to mice and cows, while further down, you get to the relatively underappreciated layers we share with fish which include the backbone and basic layout of the body.
Fishy news about hernias
Our descent from fish explains why men are so much more prone to hernias than women. In fish, Shubin explains, the testicles lie up near the heart.
(Had they remained there, he said, it would give a whole new meaning to the Pledge of Allegiance.)
The budding gonads still form up high in a human embryo, but male mammals reproduce better with their sperm kept a bit cooler than body temperature. And so during gestation, human testicles take an incredible journey down through the body to their destination in the scrotum.
The trip downward puts a loop in the cord that connects the testes to the penis, leaving a weakness in the body wall where the cord attaches that never quite repairs itself.
Hence the trouble with hernias down the road.
The matter of milk
No good story about human design flaws can pass up a discussion of flatulence and science has addressed the kind that would occur if everyone in the world drank a tall glass of milk at the same time.
Geneticist Pragna Patel of the University of Southern California said one of her favorite examples of evolution in progress involves the gene that determines who can digest the sugars in milk and who cannot.
From genetic studies it appears that so-called lactose intolerance was our ancestral state.
A few people, however, were genetically gifted with an enzyme called lactase, which breaks down lactose, and in groups that started drinking lots of milk around 10,000 years ago, that version of the gene started to take over.
Scientists recently sequenced the lactase gene and found 43 different variations that allow adults to drink the milk of other animals.
"It's the first clear evidence of convergent evolution," Patel said, though it's not known whether those lacking this innovation failed to pass on their genes because they suffered from lack of nutrition or just didn't get invited to any parties.
I say 'a' is 10 and nothing else.
You say 'a' is 50, and nothing else.
Neither can prove the other wrong.
What is 'a' then?
I would argue that cancer is a primary driver, not just a by-product. This touches on a subject that hasn't been brought up yet on this thread - how genes can mutate/switch into different states. Some can become cancerous, others can switch from producing scales to feathers (eg dinos -> birds), etc.
And so we stumble along, slowly morphing into whatever is best adapted to the environment at any particular place/time.
Mathematically, imaginary, as in, a figment of the imagination.
Like the square root of (-1).
You see. You proved your own theorem is in error. Ice cream exists when we have parallel beliefs about which is best.
“Oh, it all happened by chance... so why should a man need a protruding sexual organ, when the safest position is interior? For that fact, why male and female? Inquiring minds want to know, but ALL of us accept things by faith...”
No, you failed to realise.
That ice-cream that results from the mixture, is reality. Godless reality.
I prefer vanilla, myself, with hershey's chocolate syrup/
Sodium chloride is an ionic compound. There are no such things as "NaCl molecules." It's actually quite easy to break up a crystal of NaCl; the ions are held together by forces basically similar to those in the familiar phenomenon of static electricity.
Yes, and thanks.
I just wanted to introduce cancer as an evolutionary consequence, in a mild way.
As for such mutations being so powerful, as in tumours that are able to emit chemical agents that cause blood vessels to grow and nourish them- it is but a consequence of the value living systems place on mutation.
Ultimately, science cannot answer "How". The bible states how and fallen man dares to disagree.
:^)
Sometimes dumb arguments require such responses.
Evolve includes origin, doesn’t it? You must have a starting point in order to measure (apparent) change. How can you observe properly without it, and how can you presuppose everything that happens after the “beginning” is related. Show me CONTINUOUS records, not the spectacular leaps of FAITH that morph us from amoeba to man. There has not been enough time in history, according to what I have read... but then, I must not be reading the right liturgy!
You miss the point.
Let me take plain sugar, instead. Can you beat it with a hammer, and cause it to break down into carbon, oxygen and hydrogen - remember the analogy for comparison - it was of breaking a watch to bits, with a hammer.
The big problem is that many modifications are necessary to get the testicles into their new position in working order. It isn't just a single mutation. How all these different changes took place without compromising reproduction during the intermediate stages presents serious problems, esp. since we have no fossil record of the postulated intermediate stages. I'm not saying it didn't happen, but that the facile arguments of "pop" evolutionists skip over all the difficult details.
At least you are man enough to admit to your dumb arguments!
So, would you follow suit, too?
The point is simple. It requires faith to believe the theory of evolution.
Can you give a single documented instance of a species which became extinct because it didn't adapt (through evolution) to changing environments? Most extinctions were probably due to catastrophic events like extraterrestrial impacts, volcanic eruptions, etc., from which evolution offers no protection.
You have a body - you are a soul. People who think they are a body fight against evolution, because it seems to lessen them. They don't want to think of themselves as hairless apes. They know intuitively that they are higher beings, but can't explain the body's shortcomings without resorting to some sort of reductio ad absurdum argument about how "God made us perfect." Thus the current quest to make Intelligent Design a scientific discipline when it is really a religious doctrine pertaining to how the soul is able to inhabit and use more advanced forms of Earthly life - and not a completely invalid one, just not a science.
It's perfectly valid to conclude that a Designer created the first Life - many scientists do. But it's also clear that He gave that Life an intelligence so that it could it develop further on its own.
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