possible God's possible purpose and nature:human complaints (The nature of a \'Creator\')

by David Turell , Tuesday, June 01, 2021, 20:01 (1269 days ago) @ David Turell

Another human author complains:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/evolution-gone-wrong-review-our-fallible-bodies-1162249398...

"In Alex Bezzerides’s entertaining “Evolution Gone Wrong: The Curious Reasons Why Our Bodies Work (or Don’t),” the author’s quest is to determine the origins of the “aches and pains of the masses and why they happen”—not the mechanical causes of our maladies but the evolutionary ones. The explanation, Mr. Bezzerides concludes, may be found in our anatomical shortcomings—“trade-offs” made during our continuing evolutionary history. The result is that even healthy bodies operate at the edge of acceptable performance, while also being prone to fail in predictable ways.

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"For many individuals, the textbook display of 32 neatly arrayed teeth, systematically configured to produce a perfect Hollywood smile, is at best hopeful and more frequently fictional...So why don’t our teeth fit into our mouths?

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"...as humans controlled fire, learned to cook, became cooperative, and developed hunting techniques and an accompanying armamentarium of cutting implements, the requirement for robust dentition diminished. We were nevertheless stuck with the legacy of “a mouth full of large teeth.” Jaw and tooth size subsequently began to decrease, yet the distinct genetic programs controlling each led to a disconnect between their relative rates of reduction. While the human jaw enthusiastically embraced its “great shrink,” tooth-size reduction struggled to keep up. Hence the modern tooth-jaw mismatch.

"Our imperfectly functioning eyes suffer similarly from constraints imposed by our distant evolutionary history. More than half of European adults have visual defects, while a quarter of U.S. children require visual correction. The problem, according to Mr. Bezzerides, is that the eyes of our vertebrate ancestors evolved to function underwater. When vertebrates first moved onto land 375 million years ago, their eyes had already existed for more than 100 million years. The reconfiguration of such established biological hardware was not trivial, leaving us with short-sightedness and a range of oddities, including the need to blink up to 14,000 times a day while deploying a Coke can full of lubricating tears.

"The nocturnal nature of the species predating the evolution of mammals may have led to a reduction in the number of photoreceptor types enabling human color perception. While many fish, reptiles and birds perceive color using four types of photoreceptors, we make do with three. As a result, the humble gecko perceives the world in up to a magnificent 100 million shades of technicolor, while we are limited to no more than one million.

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"A benign creator would surely have designed a respiratory system in a way that did not leave us in perpetual fear of choking. But once again this apparently bizarre arrangement results both from our evolutionary origins—the lungs began as an offshoot of the digestive system—and from the requirement for a descended larynx. This “clunky anatomical fault” may give us a fright every time a “hot dog takes a wrong turn at the intersection,” as Mr. Bezzerides writes, but it also facilitated the origin of human speech.

"Other maladies may be traced back to the origin of bipedalism. We weren’t designed to be erect, and becoming so has caused no end of problems for us, from back pain and torn menisci to sprained ankles. An ostrich has eight bones in its foot, whereas we have 26. A rational designer would never have included such gratuitous largesse. We are constrained and confined by our “evolutionary baggage.'”

Comment: He finds the tradeoffs as mistakes while I see them as brilliant designs which result in creating speaking thinking humans. For example, we know how to pull extra wisdom teeth with our brains.