The Appendix/Cave Fish Eyes/Etc. are (NOT) vestigial

It was a humorous reply made to beaglelady, who got the joke.

You, on the other hand, appear to be humorless.

BTW, I am also an engineer.

And on a serious note, I would expect an intelligent designer that is also a good engineer to not give a bipedal creature a spine designed for a quadrupedal creature thereby subjecting the bipedal to back pain among other problems. Even for a designer who created all life don’t you think this would qualify as common sense?

From Wikipedia

The problems noted in the Wikipedia article shouldn’t have been a problem if we were actually designed and not the result of evolution reusing the spine that was already present.

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Not to mention how our capacity for speaking made us vulnerable to choking. Or babies coming out near a sewage system?

I suppose I should confess something to you. This is how I actually go about posting on these forums:
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I can see why you think this could be the case. You saying this does make me realize something that I have a tendency to do. From your perspective all you see is me making a broad sweeping statement about the fact that there really is no conspiracy against anti-evolution creationism. What you don’t see is the thousands of hours I’ve spent previous to this being on both sides of the coin and landing somewhere in the middle.

The Sternberg Controversy? Oh dear, yes they celebrate his martyrdom even though there are many more reasons for his dismissal. Here’s a third party’s take on the issue:
http://scienceblogs.com/dispatches/2006/12/19/creating-a-martyr-the-sternber/

The Meyer paper wasn’t even very good and had many unsupported claims and it seems that Sternberg really wasn’t the greatest coworker and not the best at his actual job at the Smithsonian. There are many interesting parts for me reading through Sternberg’s take once again, including all the “anonymous” reviewers the paper supposedly had. The whole thing is really quite shady even if I want to look at Sternberg’s actions in the best light. Here is a critique of the Meyer paper that it would have been subject to had it actually been sent to scientists in the most relevant fields:

The conclusion I’ve found is very true for most critics of modern science:

There is nothing wrong with challenging conventional wisdom – continuing challenge is a core feature of science. But challengers should at least be aware of, read, cite, and specifically rebut the actual data that supports conventional wisdom, not merely construct a rhetorical edifice out of omission of relevant facts, selective quoting, bad analogies, knocking down strawmen, and tendentious interpretations. Unless and until the “intelligent design” movement does this, they are not seriously in the game. They’re not even playing the same sport.

A story from when I joined an Electrical Engineering group as a postdoc. I started working with one of the engineers there on his project while I waited for my stuff to come in. He was try to measure what are called DNA nanotubes passing through a small channel and had been collecting data for about six months. My first thought was ‘I wonder what one should expect to see from a theoretical standpoint.’ He got upset with me and said ‘stop wasting your time doing all these calculations, we just need to analyze the data.’ Lo and behold, I demonstrated that he was actually measuring junk as the tubes were being ripped apart by the electric force inside which corresponded well to the data he was measuring. Needless to say, he did apologize!

So it was entirely meant to be a joke. I don’t seriously believe or endorse Salem’s hypothesis and I hoped that that would have been clear. It seems @Bill_II also had one that didn’t go over so well either.

Or the routing of the laryngeal nerve in a giraffe.

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Excellent piece.

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@Ashwin_s (and @Chris_Falter):

In fact, with variants as different as the blind fish in the cave and the sighted-fish (belonging to the same species), the question of “common ancestry” is not mute at all. In fact, it proves that “common ancestry” has much more explanatory power than simply saying “God specially creates most life forms”!

Do you think God would intentionally use Special Creation to a species that was both sighted and non-sighted (even without eyes?)?

Or does that seem much more like something that God would arrange through common descent, using Natural Selection to help execute his plans for that fish?

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You didnt sound like you were somewhere in the middle. Your stand was fairly clear… these guys dont get published because their ideas (or they themselves are crazy)

The same third party that seems to think Engineers are more prone to become religious psychopaths?
Didnt bother to read it.

Usually if scientist object to a paper. They publish their objection in another paper…
Would love to read a peer reviewed rebuttal…

Not an ideal engineer or scientist for that matter…

You might have meant it as a joke… but the article was a bit offensive… and totally dum.
Bad taste.

No one denies ancestry within a species… Its a proven fact… All animals have biological parents. grand parents etc… and they inherit genes from them. However, if you extrapolate this truth… then you would require every species to arise from one pair of males and females. Yet scientists refuse to do this. .And its fair to say that all extrapolations need not be true.

If an Ad infinitum extrpolation of this fact backwards into history need not be true even at an intra-species level… It definitely could be wrong at a cross species level…
This is faulty logic.

Glad to now you are an engineer Bill.

Have you looked in to this claim and similar claims deeply?
What are the alternatives?
And what are the differences in the spinal structure of a human from a cat? (we cant walk on fours )
And lastly, how much of these problems are related to ageing?
One argument i can think of without getting too much into details is that these are problems normally associated with ageing and required for death.
If the purpose was not for us to live for ever… we would not see these things.If the designer wanted to create creatures that could perish… then we would.

I am certain this is not going to be a popular answer.

Edit: As an engineer, you must know that we don’t design anything to last forever… we have our common sense reasons… I believe the creator has reasons different from ours…

Middle ground = evolutionary creationism or some variant of that word. Mountains of evidence for common descent/theory of evolution + my personal experiences and faith choice in God.

The Salem Hypothesis was obviously satirical. The website doesn’t actually believe that and if you still think that, I’m sorry.

That’s very sad. It was even an article that was spoken positively of by @glipsnort who doesn’t tend to waste his time here finding links to obvious satire like me- you can see some select publications of his here: Stephen Schaffner, Ph.D. – Sabeti Lab

I wish you would actually read it and stop believing that there is some kind of conspiracy against Sternberg (hint: there’s not yet he is purposefully portrayed as a martyr for the ‘truth.’).

I give up. I doubt that you would as Meyer’s article wasn’t even peer reviewed yet it’s seen as gospel truth for so many. It was clear that it ignored large bodies of evidence (despite supposedly being a ‘literature review’) and cherry picked a few ideas from other ID articles (that don’t even support his hypothesis) and books that weren’t peer reviewed. Meyer also has no relevant background in any of the fields required to write such a paper but yet his publication went through.

If you say so. Glad you are a perfect combination of both.

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Deep enough to believe them.

I would expect an intelligent design to come up with something better than what we have. He is after all supposedly the great and powerful designer.

I have had lower back pain since I was 17 so I know that is not related to ageing.

They aren’t. Good to know the Intelligent Designer puts in planned obsolesce. As if there aren’t enough other build in mechanisms that limit our age.

Edit to add: Some of your “defenses” are getting to be quite amusing if I say so myself.

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@Ashwin_s, maybe your analysis would have the correct conclusions if it had correct premises. You are incorrect when you say “… then you would require every species to arise from one pair …”

Individuals do not “evolve” - - populations evolve. And there are only a handful of populations that evolved by means of a single novel individual.

[[ NOTE: some song bird populations have been started by individuals who developed a novel song that was rejected by most of that populations available mating companions, except by relatives or offspring of the individual with the novel song. By definition, this leads to a new population that is, de facto, reproductively incompatible with the original population; over time, this leads to separate evolutionary responses to the environment. Additionally, some plants and simple animals or protists) are able to create a new population in a single generation by means of a single mutation. ]]

This means there is not a single pair behind most speciation events; speciation occurs at the population level.

So, the only way to conclude otherwise is to suggest that God “poofed” some species into existence. The fact that the predecessors of many of Earth’s existing larger mammals (elephants, rhinos, giraffes, tigers, bears, etc.) do not appear in the fossil stacks until after “proto-” versions of these animals (smaller and/or uniquely anatomically similar to the existing kinds) is the evidence that the final versions were not “poofed” into existence.

Further, these proto-versions of modern forms do not appear in the fossil stacks until after even earlier models first appear. And, ultimately speaking, the fact that none of these larger versions appear until after the extinction of all dinosaurs above a certain size, is the most compelling of all evidences that evolution on Earth requires a sequence of populations. If God “poofed” all these animals into existence at the same time, then we would find rhinos drowned along with triceratops, and giant marine lizards drowned with proto-whales.

But we do not.

Not originally. I was a regular on talk.origins back when the hypothesis was formulated, and Bruce Salem was serious about it. It’s consistent with my experience, too – creationists with technical training seem to be disproportionately engineers rather than scientists. That may reflect something about engineers and scientists in the larger population, or about who shows up to argue about evolution – or it may be nothing but illusion.

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True. Evolution can’t go back to the drawing board–it has to use what it is stuck with. Real designers, such as computer programmers, might patch old programs but after a while they go for a total rewrite, especially as new needs arise and new technologies come about. And these human programmers are under budgetary and other constraints. But the great and powerful designer should be able to do better than the clumsy kludges we see in nature.

But this all goes afoul as we pretend that we know what all priorities any “greatest designer” ought to have … which always look suspiciously like our own priorities.

So some admire a designer who insists on starting from scratch. Okay. But I could just as easily admire the designer who is able to take existing material, and with it fashion something admirable. Under this different view, we could make fun of the crippled designer who has to have everything handed to him custom made because he’s incapable of making use of anything as it already is. What a wasteful designer! And of course this too would fail, because this too is just a human priority --how some of us would like to see it done.

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The designer might actually want a disease that disproportionately kills the poor, the very old and the very young. We don’t have a clue about how God feels about the least of these…

that’s the classic difference between what we see of Nature, extrapolate in our interpretation of God’s character, and how Jesus cared about the “least of these,” isn’t it?

it’s not necessarily easier with YEC as by definition all evil came about because God hated one sin–that is just as bad (or worse).

It goes to show that we can have compassion for others–because it is so darn hard to interpret all that. Thank God for messages like Jesus and Psalm 103.

The problem with thinking that God designed bad backs, diseases, parasites, etc. is that you could say that Jesus came to clean up God’s mess. Makes no sense! And now atheist Bill Gates is trying to cure malaria! Ouch, my brane hurtz!

I’ve heard that he’s working on malaria–that would be a real boon to the folks in Africa. There are so, so many children and adults who die every summer in Africa–I think it’s the largest infectious disease killer in the world.Good for him!

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If Bill Gates is indeed an atheist, then we could use a few more like him. He and his wife both attend a Catholic church and think that it is important for their kids to be there. He may not sign off on all the traditional Christian doctrines, but if he’s supposed to be hard core about it all, apparently somebody forgot to tell him that.

Take care of yourself, Beaglelady! The world has always been a glorious mess. Methinks a certain Creator must not mind that too much, though it would seem he calls each of us to add the love we can to our little corners.