Thursday, November 4, 2010

A Reaction to a Dawkins Reaction

In a response to the blog "Evolution's not Always Perfect" posted by the scientific approach blog team I think it's interesting to point out some of the terms that Dawkings' uses in order to express the notion of the non-existence of a 'designer'. Within the blog there is a video of Richard Dawkins narrating and assisting in a dissection of a giraffe's neck. Here we see an 'overly' long, 'inefficient' laryngeal nerve. We see that the nerve must travel a considerably longer distance then would seem 'economically feasible' as the nerve's starting point and end point are only a few inches apart. Dawkins suggests that "this is not an intelligent design" due to its inefficiency. He directly equates a designer to an engineer, saying that unlike an engineer "evolution can't go back to the drawing board" and thusly that "evolution has no foresight."
I think it is very important to mention here that although he does raise a good point in the fact that the laryngeal nerve is 'seemingly' inefficient, that is about the only valid observation that he makes. The problem with his argument is that he defines designer as engineer, when in reality it is the other way around. An engineer is a man, who follows man's cycle of invention through innovation and who does so through the use of design. Although he is a designer, an engineer still possesses all the other human qualities that a nurse, a doctor and a carpenter share, and with those the potential to err. As a means of remedying their errors, engineers go back to the drawing board. This is not only how engineers create greater, more efficient and more effective structure, but also the reason why there continues to be an improvement.
Evolution on the other hand is not man. We've understood it thus far through man's perspective by observing it and expressing our observations through speech and experimentation. It is not so much that evolution/the designer has no foresight, but not foresight that likens itself to that of human foresight.

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