I can’t be the only person who worries a whole lot when they meet someone who believes in Intelligent Design. Now, I don’t mean because a staunch refusal of science creeps me out (it does, though, just to be honest here) but simply because if these people can look at human bodies and go “Yup, this had to be designed by someone who meant it, who was incredibly genius and amazing” – well shit they aren’t seeing the same bodies I am.
We are astonishingly stupidly built creatures. If this was the result of “Intelligent Design” it just couldn’t have been very intelligent, is what I’m saying. Like maybe God is a school kid and we’re his science fair experiment, but he lost to Zeus who did an awesome volcano. Still, God’s parents hung Earth up on the fridge and told him how awesome he was.
When really, there are Lego sets that are built to last more than we are. Come on. Some folks hold up the eye as an “amazing design” and to them I … well to them I offer smacks with a shovel upside the head. Who builds a primary sense organ out of a wet bag of goo with no protection, staples it onto the front end of the chassis and then, and then, manages to put the retina on upside-down? This is a good thing?
And then let’s make joints that are basically bone on bone, because that would ever work well, and to ease the instant problem we’ll add some goop that doesn’t last long and breaks down fairly easily. That’ll certainly aid things.
We can also, because hey why not, hang it all off a spine that was never designed to support walking upright this long or often without serious problems in degradation. Tonsils and appendixes are really intelligent design, they designed so well we don’t really need them, and they’re mostly there to cause more trouble then they may be worth.
What part of the human being experience is actually intelligent design? What, it couldn’t have occurred in nature without a smart and steady hand guiding it? See, nature’s blind groping I can buy. Evolution (and for the record, Evolution isn’t a theory, it’s a provable fact. The “Theory of Evolution” is for the HOW not the DOES IT – it’s a crucial difference and I will beat people who can not comprehend this) kinda just does stuff that makes sense at the time, over long periods of time. It may not be for the better overall, it may leave side-effects and an inability to operate heavy machine and can, in fact, cause drowsiness, but that’s just the way it works. And if you look at our bodies, man, there was some blind groping toward an ideal of “Well let’s try this! The last few centuries have needed more of that! Oh, wait, we don’t anymore? Well, shit, it takes a while to clear that out, but it isn’t hurting anyone so whatever.”
But if someone is directing this shit, or worse did it once and then left it alone, then they must be really incredibly horrible at their job. And don’t toss bananas at me, either, as proof that someone had to design a fruit like that. They weren’t designed like that. Humans spent years engineering bananas to be that size and shape and the peel to be that thin. Decades. They weren’t always and more other types of banana still aren’t. So shut the fuck up about bananas.
Seriously, people. Explain this to me like I’m simple. Look at human beings and then explain where the “intelligent” design comes in, without also making your Creator-type-hoodoo Being look like some dick working off a half-written Instructables page.
Eisner and Harvey award winning editor, writer and tired person. Novelist, comic writer, cat owner, NY'er.
Well obviously, Intelligent Design isn’t so much about whether or not the designer was intelligent, but that it’s a scientific theory the same as Evolution, and deserves to be treated so.
See, Evolutionary Theory is a science. It’s a hypothesis that can and is tested, and rather than being bold proof of fact, it’s rather a disproof of a lot of other things, leaving only one logical explanation left.
The only way Intelligent Design differs is that it’s infallible. Wait, that would mean it’s not a hypothesis, and therefore it can’t be tested. Which means it’s not available to be established by the scientific method. Which means it’s not actually scientific at all…
(insert vaudeville villian voice and fist shaking here)Ooh, confound it! Damn you, logic, you’ve foiled me once again!
Damn you logiiiiiiiiiiiic!
It’s true: we are made to some amazingly shoddy standards. We’re tweaked to the point of “ahhh that’s good enough” and no further. Left to our own devices, we last around thirty years and then our teeth rot and an infection kills us.
If we were designed with any intelligence, we’d be made of lightweight, durable metal. Like titanium or something. We’d be what ID advocates imagine we are: machines. But we’re just a bunch of stuff that’s been tried again and again until it works.
This doesn’t mean we aren’t beautiful and miraculous, mind you. We are! But not in the way that some folks believe.
Right. We’re wet sacks of rotting meat. Hooray!
Pfsh, speak for yourself. I ain’t rotting yet.
We’re all rotting in a Sylvia Plath sort of way.
Greetings, Earthlings – Bags of Mostly Water
(said in robot voice)
“Ahhh fleshyones…”
You can rot like Sylvia Plath. I’ll rot like Virginia Woolf
And you’ll get to ireland before me?
Sir, I have already BEEN to Ireland. Got family there. Visit at least once every three summers.
So I have spoken only the truth!
Haha, you have at that. Well played, well played.
Ah but it’s a different kind of intelligence.
It’s more the kind that says to itself, “Let’s make a dodgy sort of organism and give it enough intelligence to wonder where it came from then we can sit back in mild amusement as it tries to decide if we’re here or not.”
A few thousand years later it says, “Remind me again why we did this. And why didn’t we put in an off switch?”
Ha!
Our brains, our imaginations, our capacity for love and compassion and empathy and for going against the grain of animal instincts, our ability to reason and feel and choose and to create and dream, in the human spirit, the human soul, I see intelligent design. And the body doesn’t seem so important….
That’s how I feel about it. But I’m thirsty for more conversation….and some Gin….
And you are not even a female… You wanna talk Intelligent design, ask me how I feel about it ever 28 days or so.