![]() The response was exactly what one would expect from lawyers. I gave some examples of bad design and showed a picture of an infant with a well-formed tail to illustrate one example. In the debate, I emphasized the problem of bad design that I outlined above, mentioning that bad design is common in nature and poses serious problems for ID. I have watched such tortured reasoning-much of it by a lawyer-in the aftermath of my debate with ID theorist Stephen Meyer a few weeks ago. The weakness of any case becomes clear when the logic used to make the arguments is strained, selective and irrelevant. When someone from the 1,000 witnesses appears on the stand, your lawyer tries to make their integrity appear suspect, and to call their competence into question. If 1,000 people saw you commit the crime and Joe saw someone else do it, Joe’s testimony is the only one that matters to your defense lawyer. To understand this strange phenomenon, we have to appreciate that ID handles scientific evidence the way lawyers handle evidence in legal cases, namely paid to come to a foregone conclusion, no matter how poorly supported. How then, does the Intelligent Design movement (ID) persist, in the face of so much damning contrary evidence? ![]() For every arrow pointing toward a “designer,” there are a thousand arrows pointing the other way. ![]() For every “irreducibly complex” thing with more design than can be accounted for by present science, there are a thousand things in nature with inferior levels of design. The presence of so much “unintelligent” design across so many species should demolish the central claims of the Intelligent Design movement. From Darwin to the present, the existence of bad, sinister, unintelligent design has provided powerful evidence that species were not created in their present forms but must have evolved over time-and evolved in such a way that the designs we encounter in ourselves and other species today are often the opposite of intelligent. These dreadful exhibits are the undeniable proof of evolution, linking present species with their ancestors in the clearest of ways. And every other species-and there are millions of them-also carry vestiges of its life history. ![]() We are walking museums of natural history but some of the exhibits are rather dreadful. Chimpanzees and orangutans have the same broken gene, which can only have been inherited from our common ancestor for whom it was functional, as it still is for many animals.Įvery human being embodies the history of our species in the form of stuff inherited from the past. We have a gene to make Vitamin C but, unfortunately for those sailors who died from scurvy, it is broken, so we have to get Vitamin C from our food. Other historical markers can be found in our genes. Most pythons have atrophied useless pelvises floating inside their abdomens, not connected to anything. Blind fish living in dark caves have eyes that can’t see. Flightless birds have non-functional wings. We call this useless anatomical baggage “vestigial.” Every species has some of it. We have a bunched-up third eyelid in the corner of our eye that provided a transparent eye covering for our ancestors, allowing them to “blink” without have to fully shut down their vision. ![]() We have muscles that some of us, including me, can use to wiggle our ears, which would be useful for locating sounds if our hearing was more acute. We have goose bumps, for example, that our hairy ancestors used to make their fur stand up straighter when they needed extra warmth or wanted to look menacing. We carry the evidence of this long history in our bodies-features useful to our ancestors but, for various reasons, not to us. Unfortunately, natural selection has no mechanism to eliminate useless features, but traits that become irrelevant can atrophy or get co-opted for some other task since there is no longer a disadvantage when those features show up in a weakened form. As we evolved through time, responding to different environmental pressures, natural selection pruned and edited, making our ancestors better at some things-like talking-while ignoring skills and characteristics that became less relevant in new contexts-like smelling. Human tails are part of the evolutionary baggage that we carry in our bodies, leftover from our ancestors. ![]()
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