Whoever designed this body...

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The other day I had diarrhea, nausea and vomit and kept wondering how would people ever assume the human body was intelligently designed considering how easy it is to break it like that. I am not really sure how the way the human body handles intoxication can be seen as intelligent. Making the whole thing based on involuntary reflexes kind of sucks. We have toilets now, if we had a call on when to do those things we would do much better than now with all the involuntary reflexes in which you end up disposing things at the wrong place and wrong time... (and possibly spreading bacteria in the process, great!)

Speaking of which, what's with coughing and sneezing as a solution for the flu? it is like the designer thought that giving us involuntary reflexes to get rid of the cough was a good solution instead of just giving us the power to decide when and how to cough/sneeze (you know, so the darn disease wouldn't spread).

If I were to design a body I would at least make it handle disease better. If not make it immune to it.

Oh, and what's up with ears? Why can't we just shut them off? So, I can close my eyes, but I can't close my ears, sounds about smart. So if I want to sleep without loud sounds I just cannot do it. That's great.

Oh, and lest not forget headaches! I am sorry, but about 99% of my headaches serve no purpose whatsoever. Pain is supposed to tell you of something wrong going on, but headaches seem to give no information whatsoever, just whole afternoons of torture in which I cannot do anything.

Please, if you know the person that designed our bodies, pass this complaint to him/her.

Edit: Oh, And what about puberty? Whose genius idea was it?

Having to throw up when you eat something toxic, while it is certainly unpleasant, is a better design than that which would allow the toxic material to remain in the digestive tract and continue to be digested.

There's software handling of the ears to allow for auditory input to be filtered before it is given priority and reaches the prefrontal lobe. The same could have been done with the eyes allowing for a lack of eyelids, but our eyes work a bit better when the surface is not dried out.

Your argument about headaches relies on pain being only to tell when something is wrong as well as your own ability to determine that there is nothing wrong causing your headaches.

Then what is pain good for?

Even further, isn't it obvious that there are a number of pointless headaches? As well, isn't his inability to determine that there is nothing wrong causing the headaches itself dependent upon his body(as it is the source of information in the first place), thus putting the whole matter back at square one?

I really hate pain, I really do.

Keet, do you really want to get into this? Our bodies are pathetic and feeble. Defending them as good design would very much be an uphill battle.

Well, as you've said before there's lots of pain and suffering in the world. With a rejection of Genesis chapter 3 as a reason for this, there can only be made the inference that the intelligent designer would be malevolent or apathetic. In such a universe though, if the Creator really were totally malevolent, then there would be even far worse "horrors of nature" than even seen now, perhaps things like the xenomorph of LB426 in the Aliens quadrilogy, except as a denizen to this planet.

No, the data from the senses are still open to interpretation by the mind. Unlike computers, our thoughts have far more freedom than to allow for a blue screen of death anytime there is an error in computation. At the least we are more free to interpret data than something which can run only on the code it has been programed with. And as such that allows for a wider range in terms of accuracy, from dead on to "What in the world could that be!"

Last edited by iamnotaparakeet on 20 Jul 2010, 10:33 pm, edited 1 time in total.

don't forget the human knee. Look at an anatomical diagram sometime - it's just laughable, really.

Also, the amount of steps required for the immune response to kick in. Also the fact that humans, unlike the vast majority of other species on the planet, lost the ability to synthesize vitamin C.

One could go on for hours.

So, what is your better design of the knee? What is your better design of the immune system or can you just parrot "fewer steps, fewer steps, auwk!"?

I hardly see the pure malevolence intuition to be worse than the benevolence intuition. Some could argue it to be better. Certainly if you would argue "horrors of nature" should exist with an evil God, I should be able to argue that all people will eventually find an eternity of bliss with a good God, or predation would not exist, or some other thing.


'keet, yes, data from the senses is open to some interpretation, but the issue is that "interpretation by the mind" is still a product of the mind and built in mental structures. The mind and mental structures are part of the body. Now, are you going to annoyingly shift from one foot to the other, or are you going to recognize that this is an issue?

Really, really brief answers:
wrt the knee, the ACL, PCL, MCL, and LCL system is silly. It looks like what an eight year old would slap together. For starters, a more solid bony capsule (like the elbow) would help, and would still allow for a good range of motion with less risk of blow-outs.

wrt the immune system, instead of having antigens have to be presented to lymphocytes, why not just let the T-lymphocytes recognize the antigens themselves? It's not like that would increase autoimmune disorders, and it would sure speed things up.

wrt vitamin C, why the hell not just let humans synthesize it just like everything else does? Did some desiging god want all those sailors to lose all their teeth and/or die greusome deaths?
And let's not forget the neuronal axons that all lie in *front* of the light-receptive cells, necessitating a blind spot and possibly blurring our vision.
I'm a biologist. Like I said, I could go on for hours.

Ok, here's a fun one, how about wisdom teeth? They usually come in wrong, and the vast majority have to get them removed via surgery.

What about the fact that we partly use the same tube for ingesting and for breathing? That's ridiculous.

If we are going to consider that a designer exists and work within that paradigm, then the existence of a soul or spirit as part of the human existence would not be out of line. If we are going to consider the possibility of a designer but only from the paradigm that all that exists is material then the argument is circular.

I've gotta complain. I think our body design would have been better with photosynthesis system built in. It would have helped eliminate the obesity problem.

/it's the first body mod I'll get if/when genetic body modification is possible...REALLY go green.

Having both the mouth and nose linked to the trachea is a bad design? Would you prefer to only have your nose connected to your trachea and only have your mouth connected to your esophagus? What would be the cost of that in terms of how often people would die of a runny nose as compared to how often people currently die of swallowing food the wrong way?

I like that idea - and there's even a precedent:
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn1 ... enes-.html