unintelligent design, intelligent design, appeal to ignorance, affirming the consequent, and the scientific method th
R Dawkin's strongest arguments against intelligent design point out how badly engineered bodies seem to be. Examples include the following: 1. the vagus nerve, which starts from the brain and wanders needlessly through the body (around the heart) before comiing back up and linking to the trachea (the length of this nerve is most notably excessive in the giraffe, points out RD); 2. the vas deferens, which starts at the gonads and then circles needless around the bladder on the way from gonads to penis [I wonder if the inefficiency here has to do with the parallel role played by correlate in females]; 3. the human back [I wonder if those stone age guys in New Guinea have backaches: perhaps it's our chairs that are unintelligently designed]; and 4. the eye, which places the nerves inside the area where light must pass, creating an obstacle course for signals [I need to recheck each of these examples to see if I've accurately represented them] and creating a blind spot in th...