Unintelligent Design
Lost amid all the recent discussions of intelligent design -- including Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal's decision this past Friday to sign a bill that allows teachers in his state to "supplement" classes on evolution with talk of creationism -- is one simple basic fact. The human species isn't intelligently designed.
When you get right down to it, from an engineering perspective, the design of the human mind (and for the matter the human body) is a bit of mess.
Take, for instance, human memory, and the trouble we often have in remembering even the most basic facts -- where did we put our keys? Where did we park our car? Because our brains so often blur our memories together. Human eyewitness testimony is often no match for even a low-rent survelllance camera, and memory can fail even in life-or-death circumstances. (6% of all skydiving fatalities, for instance, are from divers that forgot to pull their ripcords),
Our troubles with memory in turn lead to an unending litany of problems that the psychologist Timothy Wilson collectively refers to as "mental contamination", in which irrelevant information frequently, ranging from the physical attractiveness of political candidates to random numbers on a roulette wheel, subconsciously cloud human judgments. If an ugly child throws an ice-filled snowballs, for instance, we judge that child to be delinquent, but when an especially attractive child does the same thing, we excuse him, saying he's just "having a bad day." A study published earlier this month showed that people's moral judgments are more severe when made in a disgusting, soiled pizza-box filled office than when in an office that is neat as a pin; another, which appeared just last week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, shows that voters are more likely to favor school policies if the balloting takes place in a school than if it takes place in an apartment building. We may aspire, as Aristotle thought, to be "the rational animal", but in reality the flotsam and jetsam of barely conscious memory frequently intercedes.
At this point, 30 years after the Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman and his late collaborator Amos Tversky started documenting a rash of fallacies in human reasoning, the idea that the human mind would be "perfect in His image" is as outdated (and narcissistic) as the idea that the solar system would revolve around the planet earth.
Imperfections riddle the body as well; the human spine supports 70% of our body weight with a single column, where four might have distributed the load better (greatly reducing the incidence of debilitating back pain), and the human retina is effectively installed backwards, with its array of outgoing neural fibers coming out of the front rather than the back, saddling us with an entirely needless blindspot.
The only theory that can really make sense of these needless imperfections is Darwin's theory of natural selection,
