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Comment by bena | Hacker News Reader

Then it's just as meaningless.

I mean, the claim is that we're so complex we must have been designed. But there are what seems like very serious design flaws in lots of organisms. Giraffes have a nerve that travel up and down their necks only to wind up a few inches from where it should be.

Our eyes have the nerves attached on the wrong side, giving us blind spots and a host of other problems.

And on and on. You can't hold life up as evidence of an intelligent designer and then when presented with evidence that we're a poor design, counter with "maybe it's smart and we don't know it".

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On the recurrent laryngeal nerve in mammals: A direct route to the larynx already exists through the superior laryngeal nerve. A second path provides redundancy if one is damaged (e.g. by disease or developmental defect)

The nerve innervates the deep cardiac plexus at the bottom, and the esophagus and trachea on its way to the larynx. So the path needs to be run anyway, leaving little advantage to another route.

Gray's Anatomy (the book, not the tv show) says during development the recurrent laryngeal nerve provides "a means of support that would permit the ductus to develop as a muscular artery" which it can do because it "has a greater proportion of connective tissue than other nerves, making it more resistant to stretch." Having a single cell build itself into a giraffe (or human) requires scaffolding along the way, and having the scaffolding that is also reused as a functionally redundant component of its own is better design than if it were not.

The inverted vertebrate retina is needed to allow additional cooling through blood flow. This article goes into additional tradeoffs in the design: http://www.quarkphysics.ca/scripsi/vision-of-octopi-and-the-...

So more or less you are hitting all the points from this bit: https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Laryngeal_nerve#But_it_is_desi...

so I'll answer from there myself:

Make no mistake, as an explanation this achieves as much as saying "because the Flying Spaghetti Monster wanted a laugh". It does leave a few curiosities about the supposed intelligence of the designer, however, which are unanswered by this non-explanation. It effectively makes the larynx an afterthought in the design process; as if it was only a by-product of the nerve's existence rather than an aim, despite communication and language being so important to humans. But the designer, given omnipotent powers to yield creatures as She sees fit, doesn't think to merely alter the branching points of the nerves instead? This is a very counter-intuitive approach design at the very least.

The article you quoted says "there seems to be no apparent benefit to an extensive routing of the nerve supplying the larynx," but it doesn't mention or address the three reasons I cited above.

> On the recurrent laryngeal nerve in mammals: A direct route to the larynx already exists through the superior laryngeal nerve. A second path provides redundancy if one is damaged (e.g. by disease or developmental defect) > The nerve innervates the deep cardiac plexus at the bottom, and the esophagus and trachea on its way to the larynx. So the path needs to be run anyway, leaving little advantage to another route.

So the main route between NY and Philly will loop through Chicago. We will build a secondary direct route between NY and philly, but it'll only allow access to certain suburbs not the entire city [1].

This route will connect NY and Chicago on its way there, and NY and philly on the way back. I certainly don't see any advantage to any other route. not even if I were omnipotent and omniscient could I do that.

>during development the recurrent [....] own is better design than if it were not.

During the building of the NY-Philly-throughChicago route, we will be bringing life and jobs to the local communities, so this is of course GOOD DESIGN.

ps.

[1] According to wiki https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superior_laryngeal_nerve "All intrinsic laryngeal muscles except the cricothyroids are innervated by the recurrent laryngeal nerve." so I don't know what you're talking about in (1)

If you need to make deliveries along the whole path from NY to Chicago to Philly, the path makes sense. If the road is necessary to anchor Chicago and keep it from floating away during the development of the United States, that's another reason, although our analogy is becoming strained lol.

If you are missing either of the superior or recurrent laryngeal nerve, you can still speak, although not as well as if you have both. Doctors use this hoarseness as a diagnostic for various chest issues.

United Airlines Flight 232 also illustrates the importance of running redundant cables through different paths. One piece of shrapnel pierced all three hydraulic systems on board, and nearly half the passengers were killed.

>If you need to make deliveries along the whole path from NY to Chicago to Philly, the path makes sense.

Come on man seriously? No, what makes sense if you are designing this is to make one direct connection between Ny-Philly and another NY-chicago.

Criticisms about organism design would carry more philosophical heft if humans had designed... well... anything that was capable of self-replication. We can't even do it cribbing off of the existing designs yet, let alone design something truly original. And if you cross that bar, there's still a long way to go before we've built something as complicated as, say, a paramecium.

I was talking to my kids about my job a couple of months ago, and showed them the view of source code I usually work with. They laughed and said it was colored funny. I'm not particularly convinced the criticisms of "obvious design flaws" in organisms are any more sophisticated than that.

You are equating your kids' reaction to your code to scientists who have spent their whole life doing science on a topic.

Why does everyone have such strong opinions about biology in particular, there's never doubts about what the physicists say but everyone's an evolutionary biologists

"You are equating your kids' reaction to your code to scientists who have spent their whole life doing science on a topic."

I have a sneaking suspicion calling people who ankle-bite about giraffe nerves and backwards eyes and the one or two other stereotypical complaints "scientists who have spent their whole life doing science on a topic" is, how to put it, comprehensively false.

When humans build anything even remotely resembling an organism that can survive on the same terms as living organisms, I'll pay more attention to the design criticism. Preferably criticism coming from the people who actually did it. Until then, though, even though you misrepresent me (or perhaps rather, badly misrepresent the people making complaints), I'd still stand by the misrepresentation. Today's scientists are still at the point where they are examining the syntax highlighting and hoping to derive insights about the programming. This is not because they have made no progress, but because there is so much progress yet to be made. People complaining about giraffe nerves aren't even that far; they're just repeating propaganda with no understanding, and deserve all the respect such people should be accorded.

Let me give you a concrete metric as to when I'll say we're starting to get a handle on it: When humanity stops systematically discovering that organisms are even more complicated than we thought. When genes could be sequenced, we thought that was going to be it. Then epigenetics. Then the discovery that introns actually aren't as useless as we thought. And so on. Long before we've got it all figured out, we'll stop discovering entirely new sets of dimensions of variation. We clearly aren't there yet, and I see little reason to believe we're even close.

Physicists get their share of doubt too. Reactions towards string theory, for example.

The counter-argument to many "design flaws" is, as a sibling comment mentioned, they may be "artifacts of the complexity of reality," especially constraints due to the fact that living things are built up from single cells and need to be functional during the growth process, as opposed to being pieced together like a robot from existing materials.

IANABiologist, but I think I've heard that the giraffe nerve has to grow that way due to the way it starts growing, or that there is a rare mutation that doesn't actually grow that way, but it doesn't get selected for, presumably due to some other side effect.

There are also counter-arguments related to constraints regarding human eyes... Octopus eyes are supposed to be superior, not backwards with no blind spot, but I think human eyes can see way farther outside of water.

(I welcome informed corrections to any ignorance I may be spouting).

Essentially, there's a lot of nuance between "maybe it's smart and we don't know it" and "these are definitely very serious design flaws" - whether you think things were intelligently designed, evolved, or intelligently designed via evolution, it seems reasonable to think there may be at least some reasons that a lot of things were selected to be the way they are, and not what may at first glance seem obviously better, at least if you haven't considered all the relevant constraints.

> The counter-argument to many "design flaws" is, as a sibling comment mentioned, they may be "artifacts of the complexity of reality," [...]

I've been trying to answer to this for about 5 minutes and I don't know where to start to untangle this...

The "artifacts of the complexity of reality" is exactly science's position, you can't take that and use it as a counter argument against it. The argument is that while artifacts are to be expected with evolution, they cannot and should not be expected from an omniscient and omnipotent designer.

The embryology argument doesn't hold water. There is not reason for that nerve to be routed the way it is. In most creatures, it's not an issue, it's a few inches. In giraffes, it's pretty far.

Also, "constraints" seems like kind of a funny excuse when considering a creator who is described as omnipotent.

Of course, maybe the designer is just incompetent ;)

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