Sunday, 7 May 2006

Badly designed

Pointing out people’s physical defects is generally considered offensive. Commenting on big ears, knock knees, bent noses, sagging bottoms and so on can get one disliked, if not punched in the face.
But what about those defects which we all have by virtues of our membership of the human race (those of us that belong, that is)? There is little point in commenting on the things which are fundamentally wrong with everyone, representing what the insurance industry calls inherent vice. Such flaws as sinus cavities that clog, pelvises wrongly angled so that most of us get backache, too many teeth for the size of our jaws, useless vestigial organs and so on can only be explained either as the result of our evolution from differently shaped beings, or by the fact that we were designed by an idiot.
Don Wise, Professor Emeritus of Structural Geology at the University of Massachusetts, believes that “ID” as a name for the junk science argument aimed at justifying anti-evolutionism and leading subtly into creationism should properly stand for “Incompetent Design”.

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