Design flaws in organisms indicate evolution, not intelligent design

[Compassionist]

The existence of design flaws in living organisms is often cited as evidence for evolution by natural selection rather than intelligent design by an all-loving, all-knowing, and all-powerful deity. If such a being existed and created life intentionally, we might expect optimal design — yet what we see instead are structures and processes that are inefficient, prone to failure, or even harmful.
Here are some significant biological design flaws that point to evolution rather than perfect design:
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1. Human Birth Canal vs. Big Brain
• Flaw: Human babies have large heads due to our large brains, but the human pelvis is narrow for bipedal walking.
• Result: Childbirth is extremely painful and dangerous — a leading cause of death historically.
• Evolutionary Explanation: Our ancestors evolved larger brains and upright walking separately, leading to a dangerous compromise.
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2. Wisdom Teeth
• Flaw: Most people don't have room for third molars, causing impaction, infections, and pain.
• Result: Many need surgery to remove them.
• Evolutionary Explanation: Our ancestors had larger jaws due to diet, but modern humans' jaws shrank faster than tooth evolution could keep up.
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3. Human Retina Is Backward
• Flaw: The photoreceptor cells in the human eye are behind layers of neurons and blood vessels.
• Result: Creates a blind spot and reduces image quality.
• Evolutionary Explanation: The eye evolved incrementally, not from a clean-slate design.
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4. Recurrent Laryngeal Nerve (Giraffe Example)
• Flaw: This nerve travels from the brain to the larynx, but loops around the aorta.
• Result: In giraffes, it travels over 15 feet instead of a direct path of a few inches.
• Evolutionary Explanation: It's a leftover from fish ancestors, where this path made sense. Evolution modified existing structures rather than redesigning from scratch.
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5. Human Menstrual Cycle
• Flaw: Humans shed the uterine lining even if not pregnant, wasting resources and causing pain.
• Result: Menstrual cramps, anemia, mood changes.
• Evolutionary Explanation: Other mammals reabsorb the lining. Our approach may have evolved due to pathogen risks in internal fertilization.
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6. Shared Path for Food and Air
• Flaw: The esophagus (food) and trachea (air) share an entrance.
• Result: Risk of choking — a leading accidental cause of death.
• Evolutionary Explanation: The throat evolved in stages, without foresight.
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7. Human Spine and Back Pain
• Flaw: Our spine is an S-curve not ideally suited for upright walking.
• Result: Many people suffer chronic back pain, herniated discs, etc.
• Evolutionary Explanation: Our ancestors were quadrupeds. The upright posture evolved later, leading to inefficient structure.
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8. Brain Vulnerability and Mental Illness
• Flaw: The brain is highly energy-consuming and prone to many dysfunctions.
• Result: High rates of depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, etc.
• Evolutionary Explanation: Natural selection favored reproductive success, not mental wellness or long-term wellbeing.
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9. Knee Joint Design
• Flaw: Knees bear immense strain, especially the ACL (anterior cruciate ligament), which often tears.
• Result: Common injuries in sports and aging.
• Evolutionary Explanation: Knees evolved from quadruped ancestors, not optimally engineered for bipedal running and jumping.
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10. Genetic "Junk" and Mutations
• Flaw: The genome is full of non-coding or redundant DNA and is prone to harmful mutations.
• Result: Genetic diseases, cancer, and congenital defects.
• Evolutionary Explanation: DNA accumulates "baggage" over time. There's no intelligent editing or streamlining process.
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11. Susceptibility to Cancer
• Flaw: Cells divide for life but are prone to mutations that cause cancer.
• Result: One of the top global causes of death.
• Evolutionary Explanation: Cell division is essential for life, but natural selection can't eliminate all cancer risk — especially after reproductive age.
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12. Human Psychology Biases
• Flaw: We are prone to cognitive biases (e.g., confirmation bias, tribalism, overconfidence).
• Result: Misjudgments, discrimination, and conflict.
• Evolutionary Explanation: These evolved to enhance survival in specific environments, not to produce truth-seeking rationality.
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If we were designed by an omnibenevolent, omniscient, and omnipotent being, such flaws are impossible to justify. Evolution by natural selection, on the other hand, explains these quirks and imperfections as the result of a messy, blind, trial-and-error process — where old parts are tweaked, not replaced, and survival/reproduction, not perfection, is the end goal.

[otseng]

What you and several others here on this forum are promoting in ignorance, unwittingly or otherwise, is the satanic notion

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[A Freeman]

Genesis 6:5 And "I AM" saw that the wickedness of man [was] great in the earth, and [that] every imagination of the thoughts of his heart [was] only evil continually.

Psalm 53:1-3
53:1 <To the chief Musician upon Mahalath, Maschil, [A Psalm] of David.> The fool hath said in his heart, [There is] no God. Corrupt are they, and have done abominable iniquity: [there is] none that doeth good.
53:2 God looked down from heaven upon the children of men, to see if there were [any] that did understand, that did seek God.
53:3 Every one of them is gone back: they are altogether become filthy; [there is] none that doeth good, no, not one.

Matthew 7:11 If YE then, being evil, know how to give good gifts unto your children, how much more shall your Father which is in heaven give good things to them that ask Him?

Matthew 25:40-41
25:40 And the King shall answer and say unto them, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done [it] unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done [it] unto me.
25:41 Then shall he say also unto them on the left hand (those playing the goat), Depart from me, ye cursed, into Everlasting Fire, prepared for the devil and his angels (all those that do not DO God's Will):

Luke 9:55 But he turned, and rebuked them, and said, Ye know not what kind of spirit ye are of (Rev. 12:7-9; Matt. 8:22).

Romans 3:10-12
3:10 As it is written, There is none righteous, no, not one:
3:11 There is none that understandeth, there is none that seeketh after God.
3:12 They are all gone out of The Way, they are together become unprofitable; there is none that doeth good, no, not one.

If someone is offended by having the truth pointed out to them that they are promoting something that is clearly satanic (evil) -- which is what got all of us sent to this prison-planet reform school for the criminally insane in the first place -- then please learn to destroy your ego before it destroys YOU (the REAL you; the extraterrestrial spiritual-Being inside the human body you see in the mirror).

The Bible is literally replete with references to this planet being a prison, filled with evil/sinful people (aka criminals), who are literally on death row awaiting imminent execution unless, of course, we change our sinful/evil/criminal ways, i.e. REPENT.

Matthew 4:16-17
4:16 The people which sat in darkness saw great Light; and to them which sat in the region and shadow of death Light is sprung up.
4:17 From that time Jesus began to preach, and to say, REPENT: for The Kingdom of heaven is at hand.

Hopefully the few of hundreds of references indicating our own individual and collective insanity serve as a reminder why we've been COMMANDED not to judge one another or things we know very little or nothing about (Matt. 7:1-4), including alleged "design flaws" in organisms.

The only flaws here on Earth are in our minds, and of our own making.

[Difflugia]

There is not one single shred of evidence indicating there is a "design flaw" in any living organism. That doesn't mean there aren't issues that were caused by ignorant and arrogant human tampering and our propensity to destroy our natural environment instead of LEARNING to work WITH nature. It also doesn't mean there aren't parts of our natural surroundings that we simply don't understand; there obviously are MANY things which are either misunderstood or not understood at all. But our ignorance of our own arrogance blinds us from this very obvious truth.

So, are you a biological inerrantist? This just sounds like inerrancy apologetics, but with meat instead of the Bible.

[Jose Fly]

no one has EVER demonstrated that random mutations can somehow create new information, or improve existing information

Oh yay, we get to play this old game again!

How are you defining and measuring "new information"? For example, how do you determine which of two genomes has more "information"?

[The Barbarian]

nature January 2013
Applying Shannon's information theory to bacterial and phage genomes and metagenomes
All sequence data contain inherent information that can be measured by Shannon's uncertainty theory. Such measurement is valuable in evaluating large data sets, such as metagenomic libraries, to prioritize their analysis and annotation, thus saving computational resources. Here, Shannon's index of complete phage and bacterial genomes was examined. The information content of a genome was found to be highly dependent on the genome length, GC content and sequence word size. In metagenomic sequences, the amount of information correlated with the number of matches found by comparison to sequence databases. A sequence with more information (higher uncertainty) has a higher probability of being significantly similar to other sequences in the database. Measuring uncertainty may be used for rapid screening for sequences with matches in available database, prioritizing computational resources and indicating which sequences with no known similarities are likely to be important for more detailed analysis.

Shannon's equation shows that every new mutation in a population increases information. And that's where it matters. Evolution is not something that happens to individuals; it happens to populations.