I keep hearing of all these poor designs. E.g. the famous "panda's thumb", and the web site named after it. But I'm sceptical of these poor-design claims. I've read the article about the eye. I doubt we are really qualified to make a commentary on the eye design of humans and squid, given that human technology is not capable of making an equivalent.
From what I've heard, we call fewer things "vestigial" than we did 50 years ago. The phrase "junk DNA" is likely to be abandoned as an unfortunate misnomer as we learn more about DNA. Biologists are undoubtedly knowledgable and clever, but we've got an awful lot to learn about biology. So it's good not to get too self-confident in our ability to accurately assess the quality of the design of the biological world.
I keep hearing of all these poor designs. E.g. the famous "panda's thumb", and the web site named after it. But I'm sceptical of these poor-design claims. I've read the article about the eye. I doubt we are really qualified to make a commentary on the eye design of humans and squid, given that human technology is not capable of making an equivalent.
From what I've heard, we call fewer things "vestigial" than we did 50 years ago. The phrase "junk DNA" is likely to be abandoned as an unfortunate misnomer as we learn more about DNA. Biologists are undoubtedly knowledgable and clever, but we've got an awful lot to learn about biology. So it's good not to get too self-confident in our ability to accurately assess the quality of the design of the biological world.