Classic example of:
I wouldn't have designed it like that = No God
Yeah, well, some of the "designs" we see in nature are completely and utterly crazy and there's no way anybody would design anything like them.
Take the recurrent laryngeal nerve, for instance. This is a nerve that exits directly from the skull (doesn't travel through the spinal column), and connects to the larynx. It's responsible for our control of our voice box.
Now, a rational design would be for the nerve to go straight there, a distance of just a couple of inches. But it doesn't: it instead travels down into the torso, goes under a particular artery that exits the heart, then back up to the larynx. For us, this accounts to a detour of a few extra inches.
For the giraffe, though, it makes for a detour of many feet, for a nerve connection that need only be a few inches.
Evolution explains this. But a designer would be crazy to do something so silly.
This makes me smile, on one hand its said "There's a better design so why didn't God use that everywhere"
On the other hand the OP is saying
Common Design = Common Ancestry
"Things are similar so obviously its been evolved."
I find it kinda funny that both these arguments are used.
The argument for common ancestry isn't just about dumb similarities. The important thing isn't that similarities exist, but rather the pattern of similarities. All multicellular life exists in a nested hierarchy: groups within groups (side comment: common ancestry is also evident for single-celled life, but things get a bit more complex as they tend to swap genes around a lot). This was so obvious that even before evolution was ever proposed, we were already classifying organisms into groups within groups.
And this sort of classification, it turns out, isn't just superficial, but holds all the way down to the genes. That is to say, it doesn't really matter very much which methods we use to measure the particular groups that organisms fall into. We get the same answer for the groups no matter the method used.
This specific pattern is the only type of pattern that evolution allows. You cannot have anything but a "groups within groups" pattern if evolution is true: the groups within groups are the family tree of life.
And common design is insufficient to explain the full nature of this pattern. Yes, you could potentially explain
some similarities by common design. But you do not expect similarities to be limited. For instance, take a human-designed object like cars. On the surface, we can sort of divide cars into groups within groups. But this difference is usually rather superficial, and doesn't go down to the interior of the cars. For instance, when the car radio and air conditioning were invented, they spread through all types of cars, whether you're talking about sedans, coupes, sports cars, mini vans, pickup trucks, or whatever.
With life, however, a new feature in one line of descent just can't make its way into another line of descent. If one species develops feathers, only its descendants will ever have feathers, and those animals will always carry with them the other features shared by that ancestor. So you cannot get mixtures of features between different families of animals. Evolution precludes the possibility of animals that have both fur and feathers.
To go back to the car analogy, this would be rather like a situation where car radios were first developed for pickup trucks, and were never placed in any other type of car.
another AV Zombie thread
