Explaining Our World: Evolutionary Theory VS Intelligent Design

The biggest reason I like Evolutionary Theory over Creationism/Intelligent Design is that evolution explains the world around us. It’s a field that contains volumes of data on why things are the way they are today, following a path over millions of years to figure out how we got here. When we know where we come from, we know where we’re going.

Let’s look at some of the oddities of our shared existence and see what evolution and creationism have to say about them:

Teeth Problems

Human beings have incredible problems with their teeth. Tooth abscesses were a leading cause of death during and after the Renaissance. Dentists must regularly remove wisdom teeth, because our mouths do not have sufficient room to accommodate them. Braces are a common solution to the human race’s epidemic of misaligned teeth.

Other species in the animal kingdom do not have these problems. Cats, dogs, cows, rabbits, horses, foxes, beavers, snakes, buffalo, hippopotami, zebras, lions, kangaroos, and other animals aren’t keeling over dead all over the Earth for lack of dental surgery, just humans. Our mouths are simply too small for the large number of teeth our bodies try to cram into them.

According to evolutionary theory, we can blame our ancestors’ peculiar habit of cooking their food for this development. Soft, mushy, but yummy food does not require big macetors and a thick jawbone. So our jaws atrophied over the last few hundred thousand years. Our teeth have yet to catch up. Without dental surgery, people with teeth that are too big and too many to fit inside their jaws, ie. most of us, would eventually die out, replaced with people carrying the genes for more suitable teeth. Luckily, our neocortexes have found away to avoid nature’s way of fixing our designs and we can pull the excess molars.

According to intelligent design theory, a Creator made us with this flaw, probably for one of those great big “mysterious plan” things, which is another way of saying, “Who knows?”

The Appendix

“Its major importance would appear to be financial support of the surgical profession.”


– Alfred Sherwood Romer and Thomas S. Parsons.

The appendix serves absolutely no purpose in the scheme of human biology except to occasionally get infected, pop, and kill us, before we were capable of removing them through what is now a pretty routine surgical procedure.

According to evolutionary theory, the vermiform appendix is a vestigial caecum. Our herbivore ancestors required the organ to break down plant cellulose. Grass and leaves would gather in the caecum, which harbored bacteria and enzymes for fermenting the plants and breaking them down into a digestible form. When primates started getting their protein from more easily digestible sources, the organ fell into disuse, and atrophied to the pinky-sized organ now doing absolutely nothing in our digestive track.

For a deeper understanding of the matter, click here.

What’s the Intelligent Design theorists explanation for the appendix? It’s all part of the creator’s grand mysterious plan. So take solace in knowing that which designed you and your loved ones included this life-threatening flaw, because the creator loves you so much.

Menopause

The reproductive systems in female homo sapiens shuts down at a later point in their lives, preventing them from further baring offspring. This is a profoundly life-changing event for the majority of women, which affects their physical and psychological health.

According to evolutionary theory, Menopause prevents a female from baring offspring at a time in her life when she would most likely not live to raise them to maturity. Instead, the older female may now devote her energies to raising her existing offspring’s offspring, her grandchildren. The evolutionary adaptation known as the “Grandmother” was a very important development in homo sapiens’ culture adaptation and our success as a species.

I haven’t found any ID hypotheses on menopause, or anything else quirky about our apparent “designs.” This is because ID proponents are too busy attacking Evolutionary Theory to tackle the monumental task of explaining the world around them.

These are just a tiny sample of what’s wrong with the human body. There are the back problems we have because we haven’t fully adapted to walking upright. There are the infections we are prone to because our reproductive organs share space with our waste elimination organs. There’s the oxidation of tissues as we grow older, rendering them useless. There’s our knees and rotator-cuffs, which were not designed to last as long as medical science has extended our lifespans.

Why are we cursed with so many design flaws?

Because we weren’t designed.

I might be unfairly misrepresenting Creationism here, and if there are any Intelligent Design proponents who would like to take a stab at improving on my explanations, I’ll be happy to post them. I think that the biggest problem with ID is that it fails to explain the way our world works and any explanations it might provide are not provable through empirical evidence.

Prove me wrong?