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Top Design Flaws in the Human Body: Our bodies are full of hack solutions

nautil.us

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Re: Top Design Flaws in the Human Body: Our bodies are full of hack solutions

#41

Post by dekhn »

ghostberry wrote: post #36
dekhn wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The blind spot is not huge. It's easily compensated for, and it appears the mammalian eye has other attributes that make it work well. We just don't have enough data to understand whether mammalian eyes embedded a major problem that had to be compensated for, or if this design has attributes that make it desirable.

It's 7.5° high and 5.5° wide. If you don't consider that huge, then that's up to you. But for me, that counts as huge, especially since it's fairly near the middle of vision. That's over half the width of my hand at arms length.

So... this makes a difference in your daily life as a nomad hunter or software engineer how? None at all. You just don't perceive it unless you go out of your way to.

Re: Top Design Flaws in the Human Body: Our bodies are full of hack solutions

#42

Post by adam-a »

ta87878 wrote: post #30

I think the teeth/jaw issues are a matter of misuse not flawed design. The switch from hunter-gatherer diet to modern diet was too fast to blame hill-climbing evolution errors.

The article claims the problem is because our brains grew and pushed our teeth forward. Not because of diet.

Re: Top Design Flaws in the Human Body: Our bodies are full of hack solutions

#43

Post by mikeash »

SilasX wrote: post #25
raverbashing wrote: post #20

So, this is the so-called "intelligent design"? I think not.

I'm glad you bring that up, because these are the kinds of things you should cite to refute someone claiming that biological life bears the signs of an intelligent designer, supernatural or otherwise. What distinguishes intelligent from naive optimization is the ability to refactor instead of just making local improvements. Unfortunately, there seems to be a trend toward refuting IDers by claiming that the very prosp…

The "unscientific" argument is used because the "we are horribly designed" argument has been done over and over again and ID proponents just dodge it with nonsense about how it's all due to The Fall of Man or whatever.

It's not like they don't know about these problems, or nobody ever told them. They just don't think it disproves their ideas. They're offering an alternative explanation that matches the data, but provides no predictive power. You can't refute that with data, because anything that fails to match results in an alteration of the explanation to match it. All you can do is point out that an explanation with no predictive power is useless.

Re: Top Design Flaws in the Human Body: Our bodies are full of hack solutions

#45

Post by mikeash »

ta87878 wrote: post #30

I think the teeth/jaw issues are a matter of misuse not flawed design. The switch from hunter-gatherer diet to modern diet was too fast to blame hill-climbing evolution errors.

That distinction doesn't make any sense to me. The switch to a modern diet was ultimately a result of evolution. If evolution gave us the ability to radically switch diets, but didn't give us the ability to properly deal with the new diet, then that's an example of evolution producing something flawed.

Re: Top Design Flaws in the Human Body: Our bodies are full of hack solutions

#47

Post by mikeash »

dekhn wrote: post #38
protonfish wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe, but either vertebrates or cephalopods have to have sub optimal design. My money is on the backwards retina being the kludge.

No, neither is required to have a suboptimal design. Why do you think that? Mammals are quite successful.

They can't both be optimal. The probability that both are exactly equally good is so remote as to be ignorable.

Successful does not imply "no flaws." It's interesting to see this argument brought up in the context of biology. It's frequently applied to software, for example it shows up in basically every discussion of PHP.

Re: Top Design Flaws in the Human Body: Our bodies are full of hack solutions

#48

Post by bediger4000 »

What do these 'hacks' indicate about the Intelligent Designer(s) in charge of human creation? That is, can we, as believers in Intelligent Design, discern anything about the Deity(ies) who did the design? The obvious question is: "how many deities did the design? One or more?" After that, you'd move on to gender, and other indicators. Ultimately, one would hope to be able to have Scientific Proof of the truth of one or more creation stories, and denial of all the others. Or am I just dreaming here?

Re: Top Design Flaws in the Human Body: Our bodies are full of hack solutions

#50

Post by swsieber »

raverbashing wrote: post #20

So, this is the so-called "intelligent design"? I think not.

I don't know that you can even call this a counter argument to all intelligent design schemes: Christians believe that Adam and Eve live in the garden and were cursed for eating the forbidden fruit. That would make the poor parts the result of transgression and not design (most likely). So they might view it as "corrupted intelligent design"? Unclear.

I'm not too up on all the arguments surrounding intelligent design, I think the biggest issue is that there's no good way to prove / disprove it? In that regard this doesn't really contribute that much then.

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