Originally published by ANewDomain.net:
“Intelligent design” is the belief that the universe is perfectly ordered, logical and optimized, thus God exists. “The Case for Intelligent Design” explores aspects of biological design that support this thesis. This week: We look at hairs on the top of your feet.
What with the part of the earth where I live moving into more-direct alignment with the sun, it’s getting warmer. This prompts me to skip normal shoes in favor of sandals when I’m running out the door in the morning.
The first or second time I wore sandals this year, I noticed an oddly painful tug on the top of my feet. With every step I took, my sandals tugged on the hairs on the top of my feet.
This was the first time, 51 years in, that I had noticed the hairs on my feet. I knew they were there. But I never paid them any mind. I let them be, and until a few weeks ago, they did me the same favor.
Anyway, this prompts the question: What is the purpose of hairs on the top of your feet?
I called my friend the evolutionary biologist, who refused to be named for this article. “Hairs on the top of your feet,” he replied after recovering from his initial surprise at my query, “protect your bare feet from sunburn when walking in the desert. Androgenic hairs, we call them in the trade.”
“Wouldn’t it have been better for God, who does everything just so, to have given us sandals if we were meant to wander the desert?”
“He gave us big brains that allowed us to design sandals.”
“Which pull on the foot hairs that we no longer need, and instead cause us pain.”
“Got me there,” he said, excusing himself in order to pursue his biological imperative to spread his seed with a 61-year-old colleague whose husband is away this week on a book tour.
17 Comments.
I would like to introduce a new term for the Intelligent Designer. That term is “Generic Omnipotent Designer” (abbreviation: G.O.D.)
Every time I get in a discussion with an ID proponent, I ask the IDiot the same question. “If your designer is so smart, why is he such a BAD designer?”
Examples abound – your spine would make a better suspension bridge than a column, your knees and feet are thoroughly inadequate for a biped, you’ve got two lungs, two kidneys, two sides of a brain, yet only one heart … on & on.
I have yet to get a single coherent (cognizant?) answer.
Hairy feet. Sexual liaisons? is this Hobbit Porn Week?
Frodo put his finger in the ring …
Ever read Harvard Lampoon’s excellent “Bored of the Rings”?
Frodo’s uncle is named “Dildo Bugger” as per Rule 34.
I’ll add to the discussion an observation garnered from a Ted Rall article from weeks past (paraphrased): What kind of God would create butt hairs? (It had something to do with the accumulation of fecal matter on an occasion when no toilet paper was available.)
😀
D,
I keep meaning to — and putting off — compiling the DEFINITIVE list of examples of how God doesn’t know a thing about design.
What kind of sick motherfucker would make pregnancy a non-optional thing? What kind of bastard traps Bruce Jenner in the wrong body for decades? That we all have to die? Sure. I get that. But why make it a misery of failing faculties for years and years?
I saw a great one-liner the other day. The difference between me and God? If I had the power to, I’d cure cancer. Every time.
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Good post.
When you write the definitive list, I would so buy a book like that…especially if Ted illustrates it!
Ted,
If it’s not the flawed, (lack of) intelligent design that went into your sandals, then maybe you need to also use (thin) socks. I’d say just get a pair of Crocs.
DanD
I have yet to hear how, exactly, evolution is to be considered “unintelligent.”
It is, for example, the only method I know of that effectively deals with those pesky “unknown unknowns.”
A space/time conundrum where intelligent design continues(?) to evolve, while chaos (theory) ultimately tears it apart. Omniscient soap operas of an expanded universe.
DanD
Are you channeling Deepak Chopra?
My hidden point was that the religious nuts would have an indisputably omniscient and omnipotent entity to worship only if they attribute the wonders of science to the power of that being.
As it is, the nuts are stuck on the tribe-centered,
dog-demeaning notion that the universe was created so that America and its pristine capitalism could exist.
Sorry falco, I’d rather channel RAHeinlein, except that he is indeed now dead.
I’m actually an “Occam’s Razor” kind of guy, and the problem with “hidden points” is that few of us rubes will ever detect them. Ultimately, my own hidden point was to reveal that intelligent design is still affected by evolution … which came first, the chicken or the egg? Neither, it was the rooster!
Ultimately, the solipsism produced by our own minds dogmatically challenges anything that we think we know. Mysteriously, there will always be another point of view that our own solipsistic self can never experience.
But have you ever considered that “knowing God” is the ultimate communist experience?
DanD
Neither is evolution “intelligent” it is simply a mindless process, with no goals or desires.
I bruised my tailbone last winter. It hurt like hell for a couple of months. I need a tailbone why? Bill Cosby used to joke about the new hair on his ear lobes as he got older. What purpose does that serve, he asked?
Any “school” that teaches Intelligent Design should be required to teach evolutionary biology; no, every school should teach EB.
Man was made in God’s image. So why would God have hair on his feet; and why would God have reproductive equipment? By the way, why don’t we hear about Mrs. God?
The movie Noah was very popular. It raises the question how could God have been so dumb; let alone so ruthless? God “designed” the “human”. As Herman Cain said: “Blame yourself!”. When Adam and Eve messed up in the Garden of Eden they should have been reprogrammed immediately. Instead, we got “original sin”. God wiped out the human race with a flood to leave Noah and family; but never changed the basic operating system, the DNA. Of course it has just been a big repeat. “The fire next time” is apparently climate change and global warming.
Dr. Crick, DNA discoverer, thinks DNA originated on another planet. I find that interesting.
I’m willing to cut a deal with religionists. I’ll allow creation myths in public schools if they’ll teach evolution in church.
That’s fair.
Godders ought to like fair.
If God is such a great designer of human bodies, why did he run a waste disposal channel right through the middle of a recreational area?