Designing A Giraffe

Consider a giraffe. It is certainly complex. It looks designed. It was, by something with IQ (Intelligence Quotient) 1. If you look carefully at the innards of a giraffe, you will discover all manner of bungling, including the laryngeal nerve that takes a pointless 4.57 metres (15 ft) detour. A deity has infinite intelligence. The design of a giraffe is far too sloppy to be the work of a deity. If it were not a deity, what designed it? Natural selection.

Natural selection uses a mindless technique to design. It makes many tiny changes to the best design so far. It then makes prototype creatures and tries it out in the real world. The survivors become the base prototypes for the next generation. Progress is unbelievably slow. However, with billions of generations, the prototypes come to look nothing like what they did originally and they are a much better fit to the environment.

Natural selection is very dumb. It has no foresight, no planning, no ability to restart a design from scratch.

In summary, if you look carefully, living things are not perfectly designed like watches. They are kludges, the result of a really dumb natural selection design process.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)