Eclectic Thoughts : Never take pissing comfortably for granted
I recently experienced a serious bacterial infection that needed hospitalization as my prescribed antibiotics did not work and we did not know that and consequently the infection ran rampant for a week without any defenses except for my body’s innate ability to fight an intruder.
This got me thinking about the make up of the human body.
“Look at the human body, it’s a waste processing plant near a recreational area” — Robin Williams
This experience left me with an appreciation for the fine balancing act the human body has to orchestrate. Space is tight, the bladder hits up against the prostate, pressured by the rectum in the back. Thin tubes (Ureter) facilitate the transfer of the urine from the kidneys to the bladder, and another tube (Urethra) takes it from there through the prostate into the penis.
So, a smooth functioning urinary track is a blessing & a miracle. Given these tight quarters and the thin tubes, sometimes things don’t work so well and that’s when you realize what a fine balance & tradeoff goes on in the human body’s design for everything to work optimally.
Is this Intelligent Design?
I think not.
The human body is adequate for the purpose of doing what it does but can hardly be described as Intelligently Designed.
It is clear that the human body was not created from a blueprint for optimal & efficient performance. It evolved over hundreds of millions or even billions of years to its current state by improving (without foresight or design) on what came before it, bit by bit, for the sole purpose of adapting to the environment.
With evolution there is no starting with a goal & a clean slate. With an intelligent design presumably there is a designer, a purpose, vision & goal towards which to engineer the body.
Tradeoffs, resource constraints & tinkering with what’s already there
Don’t get me wrong. The human body is a wonderful & intricate machinery that often works like a well oiled machine for an average of 70–80 years. Like any machine there can be problems, sometimes severe, along the way.
But, the best that can be said is that the human body is adequate to the task, having evolved with all kinds of survival tradeoffs, economies and resource limitations to factor in. There isn’t an unlimited supply of energy, space, & resources. So every change, alteration, or mutation is a balancing act with cost/benefit analysis.
Conversely, an intelligently designed body would be modular, each unit being designed optimally for its specialized function.
Evidence suggests that the human body has taken the former route. A classic example often quoted is the Recurrent Laryngeal Nerve which travels from the brain to the heart, loops around it and goes back all the way to the Larynx.
Why such a circuitous route? One reason cited is that we evolved out of fish like ancestors, and for fish the route was direct from the brain, past the heart to the gills. Over the evolutionary path since then the body evolved as our ancestors left the waters for land, the neck extended and the heart moved father from the brain requiring a steady & constant tweaking and increase in the length of the Laryngeal Nerve since going back to the drawing board and starting from a clean slate was never an option.
