Bad Design

When biologists study living things, one of the most striking features they find is how poorly designed living things are. From the largest features to the smallest, it all looks like it was put together by some kind of incompetent engineer who kept changing his mind in mid-design, creating a mix of old ideas and new ones and adding all kinds of other features just to compensate for so many of the bad designs already there. It is as though the designer lived by a rule of never getting rid of any old designs but only tweaking existing designs to make them work for some new purpose. Sure, the designs work, but they are far from being the best design that could accomplish the same outcome.

A great example of this is the human eye. This is often held up as being a truly miraculous example of God's handiwork. But, closer inspection of the design of the human eye shows how deeply flawed it really is.

In the retina of the eye are collections of cells that are sensitive to light. When light is absorbed by them, they send a signal down a long nerve that travels to the brain. This system works well enough, and we can see because of it.

However, all of this is facing backwards! The receptor cells are facing away from the light. The nerves all go in front of the receptor cells, blocking a lot of the light coming in, like millions of camera cables strung out in front of the cameras, blocking the view. Then, because they are all in front of the retina, they have to tunnel through it to get to the brain. So, we are left with a pretty big blind spot in each eye.

If some kind of intelligent designer had designed the eye, it would have made the most sense to have the light receptors pointed towards the incoming light and have the nerves coming out the back, instead of the front, as is done in other animals' eyes.

This kind of bad design appears throughout every living organism, in every aspect of every organism. Based on the facts of biology, it does not appear that any sort of intelligent entity designed and created life.

However, all of this bad design can be easily understood by the theory of evolution. In evolution, there is no designer or central planner. Organisms can only change in small ways, retaining nearly all of their current design while changing slowly over time. As they change, they also develop ways to compensate for all of the old designs that they are stuck with, evolving convoluted workarounds.

What appears to be a completely incompetent and endlessly tinkering designer is actually just evolution, always working with whatever happens to be lying around and only able to change organisms a little at a time.