Somewhat lacking in Design.

By Scott Atran

The founders of evolutionary theory imagined adaptations — like the bullet shapes of fish and sea mammals, the wings of birds and bats, and the human being's opposable thumb and reasoning capacity — as well-crafted designs. Charles Darwin marvelled at how adaptations were functionally "perfected for any given habitat" and Alfred Wallace saw in them "very much the appearance of design by an intelligent designer on which the well being and very existence of the organism depends." Nevertheless, such designs are actually far from optimal in any engineering sense. This is because there never can be a natural selection of tools and materials from scratch.

In land animals, for example, the mouth does double duty as an opening to take in food and air. As creatures evolved from water onto land, the opening to the respiratory system was jerry-rigged to share the pre-existing digestive tract's anterior structure, including the mouth and pharynx (throat). In terrestrial vertebrates, the pharynx became a short passage linking the mouth to the oesophagus and the windpipe. Any mistiming of the swallowing mechanism, which blocks off the air passage in routing food to the oesophagus, causes choking. For humans, the problem is even worse because the mouth and throat do triple duty, serving also the function of speech. Both in swallowing food and in articulating speech sounds, respiration is temporarily inhibited as the larynx rises to close (in swallowing) or constrict (in speaking) the opening to the air passage (glottis). Humans are more liable than other animals to choke, as they attempt to simultaneously coordinate eating, breathing and speaking.

But the most imperfect design affecting the child bearer's health and life, results from evolution's jamming together the outlets of all of three major expulsive functions into the same narrow basin: the expulsion of the large-headed human foetus through this narrow region at childbirth occurs at considerable cost. The "design flaw" of human childbirth has had cascading effects: human offspring profit from having big brains, but only at substantial cost-to-fitness of relatively high fatality rates for child and mother, long periods of postnatal care and reduction in fertility rates.

Creationists, and proponents of "intelligent design," often point to human adaptations as evidence of God's plan, or "intelligent design," and good disposition towards His creatures. A closer look reveals that God may never been wholly pleased with His most preferred creations in granting them the parts they have. Why did He invert the retina and give humans (but not the octopus) a blind spot? Why, in making us upright, did He render us so liable to back problems?

The so called ‘intelligent’ designs of creatures on Earth seems somewhat less intelligent the more they are studied and looks more like what it actually is – evolution doing the best it can adapting what it has been given as the result of countless generations of adaptation and mutation.