Unintelligent design

Oystein said:
......Eating carbohydrates is a choice, subject to free will. We eat it despite knowing it's bad for teeth........
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Huh? Potatoes, rice, pasta, shredded wheat, bread.......all carbs, all no problem for our teeth at all.
 
aleCcowaN said:
Sugar beet is a much modern mutation, and sugar cane only appeared in Asian Mesopotamia when the Arabs took it there from India.

All the tales of the "peoples of the Book" predate the cultivation and elaboration of sugar sources. Even in modern times sugar is considered to be kosher even when animal bones and other animal parts are used to refine it.

So, clearly "the creator" hasn't inspired any of them to correct any design mistake made in "its created creature".
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But there's plenty of fossils that died of abscesses long before agriculture was invented. Don't blame modern food, blame the parasitic infection that evolved to suit a warm moist environment.
 
The Norseman said:
Huh? Needed correction? I've... never heard that before. The removal of the foreskin was supposed to be done to demonstrate that you're one of the followers of god; to set you off from all the rest. Nothing to do with correcting anything.
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gerdbonk said:
How can you be set off from all the rest if the part of the body you've modified can't be shown to anyone else due the shamefulness of nudity?
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The omniscient God knew when he made that covenant with Abram that several thousands years later, the Nazis would come around to search for His followers and use, i.a., the method of "drop your pants" to identify them.

That's the best I can come up with.
 
ddt said:
The omniscient God knew when he made that covenant with Abram that several thousands years later, the Nazis would come around to search for His followers and use, i.a., the method of "drop your pants" to identify them.

That's the best I can come up with.
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Not a bad guess I suppose.

Although not a very clever initiative, it is on a par with the rest of the crapy ideas, Christianity would have us believe God is the owner of.
 
casebro said:
But there's plenty of fossils that died of abscesses long before agriculture was invented. Don't blame modern food, blame the parasitic infection that evolved to suit a warm moist environment.
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Caries began with the use of fire with food, but flourished when sugary products were available to the masses.

Also, appendicitis become very common with refined flours in the late 1800s. Before that it was just "an ailment of the rich ones". Another lack of foresight from the intelligent designer.
 
Humans have hair growing from various parts of our skin. It grows to a particular length and stops growing -- except on the heads, and for men the face.

I knew a Navajo woman whose hair, braided, reached her ankles and then was pinned up halfway back to her head. I can't imagine the weight of it.

What kind of crazy thinking would lead to this unintelligent design feature?
 
xterra said:
Humans have hair growing from various parts of our skin. It grows to a particular length and stops growing -- except on the heads, and for men the face.

I knew a Navajo woman whose hair, braided, reached her ankles and then was pinned up halfway back to her head. I can't imagine the weight of it.

What kind of crazy thinking would lead to this unintelligent design feature?
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The Fashion Runway
 
Just to be clear, I wasn't referring to what my acquaintance did with her hair.

I was focusing on having one particular part of human anatomy with hair that does not stop growing. All the hair on the rest of the body gets to a certain length and stops.



BTW, we spent a few days near Dobson and Baseline last week, visiting relatives. This message is being posted from Green Valley, south of Tucson.
 
What I've always wondered about is how humans lost some of the tools animals use to survive. We don't have a lot of fur, our claws are pathetic, our senses of smell, hearing and sight not particularly acute. We've survived on brain power and the ability to alter our environment so that those senses are less critical. But I always wondered about the precarious position humans must have been in before the cognitive explosion in what, 15000 BC? So for tens of thousands of years, at least, this anatomically modern naked ape whose young couldn't walk for a year or more prevailed with sticks and stones in the absence of fur, claws, acutes sense - possibly senses we missed completely, like sonar, infrared sensors or sensitivity to magnetic fields that may help some creatures navigate. Humans have lost or never had many of the instincts/survival strategies that help keep other species going. I can see us losing these abilities after the dawn of "civilization," but we must have lost them earlier than that, leaving me to picture naked hominids staying alive in extreme environments with inferior survival attributes. Unless the lack of attributes forced humans to become more ingenious, our destiny tied to the created world.

Intelligent design might have preferred to leave humans with more instinctive survival skills.
 
Minoosh, you could pick any animal and find pathetic flaws: many have poor vision, low stamina, are really slow or sleep ridiculous amounts of time, which renders them defenseless. The very small and the very large can be said to be burdened by their size.

Apes haven't had kick-ass claws for tens of millions of years, so we never lost them. Instead we have fingers and opposable thumbs to hold things, and arms free to use at any time. All those creatures who must stand on their fingerless arms, don't you pity them for their ridiculous disability?

Our main strengths, that set us apart, are hands, the ability to run long distances, and smarts. The latter is not as recent as you think, Homo was really smart, and probably had complex grammatical language, for hundreds of thousands of years. Nursing children as long as we do comes at a high cost, but yields high benefits. It obviously worked out well on balance.
 
aleCcowaN said:
Caries began with the use of fire with food, but flourished when sugary products were available to the masses.

Also, appendicitis become very common with refined flours in the late 1800s. Before that it was just "an ailment of the rich ones". Another lack of foresight from the intelligent designer.
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Well caries exist in many prehistoric mouths, including non Homo Sapiens species. However, the patterns of the caries are different. Primitive man (and earlier) had caries mostly on the occlusal surfaces, in other words the exposed chewing surfaces of the teeth. The caries are associated with heavy occlusal wear, where the enamel has been worn off, exposing the softer dentin underneath. The dentin is structurally made up of softer calcified crystals, inundated with hollow tubules. This design promotes the impaction of food particles and bacteria. In other words, the design of the teeth promote the decay process.

Caries, due to an increase in carbohydrate consumption (especially refined sugars), displays a different pattern. Sure, you still get caries on the occlusal surfaces of the teeth, but this time without the heavy enamel wear. More importantly, you see carious lesions in the interproximal surfaces, or the areas between the teeth. This is what your Dentist is looking at when he/she takes the annoying "bite wing" radiographs. In fact, a high degree of interproximal caries is considered pathognomonic for high sugar intake.

I always thought the tactic sharks evolved would be of some use. An (almost) endless supply of teeth. Some sharks shed as many as 35,000 teeth in a lifetime. I'm not sure about the evolutionary or metabolic ramifications of this design, but the Tooth Fairy burden would have been unbearable for Early Man.
 
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Minoosh said:
We don't have a lot of fur
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...for a very good reason: we developed into hairless hunters who perspired and could run after animals during the African midday until those -furry- animals dropped because of a heat shock.

crhkrebs said:
Well caries exist in many prehistoric mouths, including non Homo Sapiens species.
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The earliest evidence of cooking is from about one million years ago. "We" were homo erectus then.
 
MikeG said:
Huh? Potatoes, rice, pasta, shredded wheat, bread.......all carbs, all no problem for our teeth at all.
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As long as you swallow them quickly. Human saliva contains an enzyme that breaks starches down into simple sugars to prepare them for digestion. There was an experiment that we did in junior high in which we applied iodine to a piece of bread and watched it turn black. Then we chewed a piece of the same bread until it was soggy, applied iodine, and there was no reaction.
 
Armitage72 said:
As long as you swallow them quickly. Human saliva contains an enzyme that breaks starches down into simple sugars to prepare them for digestion. There was an experiment that we did in junior high in which we applied iodine to a piece of bread and watched it turn black. Then we chewed a piece of the same bread until it was soggy, applied iodine, and there was no reaction.
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What a charming and practical science experiment. I substitute teach, am in awe of the people who actually draw out lesson plans.

We injected castrated chickens with testosterone and measured comb growth. That was all the way up in Biology 2 in high school though.
 
Oystein said:
Apes haven't had kick-ass claws for tens of millions of years, so we never lost them. Instead we have fingers and opposable thumbs to hold things, and arms free to use at any time.
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Thanks, I had not considered that adaptation.

aleCcowaN said:
...for a very good reason: we developed into hairless hunters who perspired and could run after animals during the African midday until those -furry- animals dropped because of a heat shock.
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Learn something new every day!
 
Minoosh said:
What a charming and practical science experiment. I substitute teach, am in awe of the people who actually draw out lesson plans.

We injected castrated chickens with testosterone and measured comb growth. That was all the way up in Biology 2 in high school though.
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if you want to up that, you can boil saliva first and then show the enzyme stops working after being heated. With some care you can even do temperature curves.
If properly prepared this is something 12 year olds can understand to a degree (don't go into enzyme structure and all that).

A similar experiment can be done with pieces of potato and hydrogen peroxide solutions.
 
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