Monday, July 2

Stupid Design

From the US, a Ted Rall cartoon on how if there is a designer of the universe, they might not be that bright.

I'd go for the design by committee option myself. Some things are very clever indeed - the processing needed to understand and recognise faces is something still beyond computers, while other things are very thick, if designed from scratch - our eyes are wired up the wrong way round, so even more clever computing is needed to ignore the blind spots.

Dawkins' explanation for this works well, of course - once you've started up Mount Impossible, you're not allowed to go down a hill just because you can see a higher hill on the other side of the valley (the only way to do so is to have evolutionary pressures decreased, so it doesn't matter so much how far up the hill you are - indeed, this may be the position with humans now, we're not evolving that much but we have rather increased the range of hills we can reach when evolutionary pressure returns)

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