In her book, The Not-So-Intelligent Designer: Why Evolution Explains the Human Body and Intelligent Design Does Not (2016), Abby Hafer gives a by turns amusing and horrifying account of numerous obvious goofs in the human body that any competent designer would fix. (Or be sued by the victims.) These are all elegantly explained by evolution, and count as evidence for it. Since evolution typically proceeds by small increments of genetic change, which are often as small as a change to a single nucleotide, the corresponding changes to the phenotype are also often small adjustments to what is already there. Evolution cannot “see” that a better solution may be far away in the design space, requiring large-scale modification of the genome at many positions simultaneously. What’s worse, these modifications would have to occur in multiple individuals at the same time, to maintain a breeding population! For more about the evolutionary design space, see Daniel Dennett’s Darwin’s Dangerous Idea (1995).
An egregious example of bad evolutionary “design” is the recurrent laryngeal nerve, which is a bad-enough mistake in humans, but reaches comical proportions in giraffes. As all tetrapod vertebrates have a similar arrangement, it would have been even more comical in the longer-necked sauropod dinosaurs. The nerve would have been as long as 28m (92 ft) in Supersaurus, almost all of which was an unnecessary detour.
Other popular books on evolution mention this remarkably bad design, including: Why Evolution Is True (2009) by Jerry Coyne; The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution (2009) by Richard Dawkins; and Your Inner Fish: A Journey Into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body (2008) by Neil Shubin.
But I’ll focus on whales today, specifically their superhuman resistance to choking and cancer, two serious killers of humans.
Debunking Christianity
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