Intelligent design? No smart engineer designed our bodies, Sherman tells premeds in class on Darwinian medicine

http://www.news.cornell.edu/stories/Dec05/...edicine.kr.html

Dec. 7, 2005

By Krishna Ramanujan
ksr32@cornell.edu

"Unintelligent design." That is how Cornell evolutionary biologist Paul Sherman refers to the architecture of the human body. If an "intelligent designer" engineered the human body, he points out, air and food would not travel through the same pipes, making us vulnerable to choking.

After teaching seminars on Darwinian medicine (Neurobiology and Behavior 420 this semester) for more than a decade, Sherman, professor of neurobiology and behavior and a Weiss Presidential Fellow, has developed such insights into the workings of the human body and why things are the way they are. They are quite counter, he says, to the idea of intelligent design -- the controversial idea that some things in nature are too complex to be explained by natural selection and, therefore, must be the work of a deity -- an intelligent designer.

"As soon as you begin to look at our bodies from an evolutionary perspective you see more and more we are not intelligently designed," said Sherman. For example, he pointed out that no engineer would design our throats with a windpipe that crosses the tube where food passes. "If you were going to design this to eliminate choking you'd probably put your mouth in your forehead or your nasal opening in your throat. It [the human body] is as one would expect from random mutations of previously existing structures and selection over eons."

http://www.news.cornell.edu/stories/Dec05/Darwinian_Medicine.kr.html