By god, he's a Bad Designer!

The other day I was pondering how our bodies have features that are poorly designed. Not to get too personal, but I have a hard time with coughing over the least little thing. Sometimes if I inhale wrong, my uvula freaks out and I start to cough like crazy. It's horrible.

So I wanted to write down some goofy examples to share with you, as if there were a god, he's pretty bad at designing. Then my mind kind of fizzled out, so I thought, hell, I'm not the first person to come up with this brilliant idea. I'll Google it. That's when I found the following video, which sums it up in about 6 minutes rather perfectly.

Neil deGrasse Tyson did a talk back in late 2006 where he ended with the following: (I have reproduced most of his slides below for your convenience)




Universe (it's not here for any singular purpose, certainly not here for us)
  • Most planet orbits are unstable 
  • Star formation is completely inefficient: Less than 3% of a gas cloud actually makes a star 
  • Most places in the universe will kill life instantly: heat, radiation, cold 
  • Galaxy orbits are bound to bring us near a supernova 
  • We're on a collision course with the Andromeda Galaxy 
  • We're in a one-way expanding universe as we wind down to oblivion

Earth (no sign of a benevolent deity here)
  • Earthquakes and volcanoes level cities and villages 
  • Tsunamis have recently killed about 200,000 
  • Floods, tornadoes, hurricanes, lightning strikes 
  • We can't live on 2/3 of the Earth's surface 
  • We'd freeze or starve to death on half of what remains 
  • Mass extinctions: disease, climate shift, killer asteroids 
  • 99% of all life that ever lived is now extinct 
  • Inner solar system is a shooting gallery: comets, asteroids 
  • It took 3.5 billion years just to make multi-cellular life (hardly an efficient plan)

Humans (only talking about nature wanting to kill us without the help of other human beings) (note, I've added some of my own here)
  • Aggressive childhood leukemia, SIDS, hemophilia, sickle cell anemia, multiple sclerosis, epilepsy, Parkinson's, ALS, birth defects, cancer (the list goes on and on) 
  • Human eye: has a very narrow view of the electromagnetic spectrum 
  • We lose an awful lot with age. Our body parts often don't last a lifetime: vision, hearing, teeth, bone mass, etc., then gain disease: prostate cancer, Alzheimer's 
  • We exhale most of the oxygen we inhale (very inefficient) 
  • We can't detect magnetic fields, ionizing radiation fields, radon 
  • Warm blooded: we have to eat constantly (compared to crocodiles) 
  • We're practically comatose for 1/3 of our lives 
  • We can't detect these gases by smell, taste or sight, yet if we breathe them in we're dead: CO, CH4, CO2 
  • Mouths: We eat, breathe, drink and talk through the same hole in our body, guaranteeing some percentage of us will choke to death in our lifetimes (what about dolphins? They eat and breathe through different holes!) 
  • Genitals: an entertainment complex in the middle of a sewage system: no engineer would design that, at all! Ever! 
  • The prostate is the g-spot for men, and by age 80 it will get cancerous in almost all cases 
  • Sexual maturity before emotional maturity (so kids can have kids) 
  • Teeth: they get impacted, come in too crowded or spaced wrong, get cavities easily, get gum disease where a toothbrush can't even reach (they have to be maintained by artificial means) 
  • Genitals: dangly testicles that are easily hurt 
  • Menstruation and menopause 
  • We're very fragile

Feel free to add to the list of "bad designs" in the comments!

6 comments:

  1. Brillant! Tyson rebuted every smoke-and-mirrors theologian with basic logic. I will definitely have to watch more videos of him.

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  2. I can't watch the video now but I'll definitely do so later.

    I'm constantly amazed at the way the IDers can insist ABC had to be "designed" because "it's so perfect" (or something similar), yet explain away anything imperfect with "God works in mysterious ways", "It's because humans/sin/Satan screwed up God's perfect design". They'll fight to the death to keep their fantasy intact rather than admit they're clinging to myths made up by Bronze-age sheep herders who didn't' know squat about squat.

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  3. Yeah, but if god invented everything, then he invented evil/satan/human error too. So he's not so damned perfect, is he?

    Yeah, see, that's classic cherry picking if you ask me. Drives me crazy! And I agree, they'll literally fight to the death to cling to those beliefs. Insane.

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  4. Video has been removed.

    Here's a mirror: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-102519600994873365#

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  5. Thanks Very Much, Pilgrim. I changed the videos so that it's working again. I really appreciate it. I think it's a really great video. :)

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