💡 Reflexes, Rhythms, and the Riddle of Randomness
“Some parts of the body—our hands and lips, for example—are more sensitive than others… But how does the connection between sensory neurons and the brain result in such exquisitely sensitive skin?”
— Harvard Medical School, Unraveling the Mystery of Touch.
How did a process
that can neither see nor hear,
install and calibrate these features?
If these characteristics
occurred by a long series
of fortuitous mutations . . .
Where is the fossil evidence
for the multitude of
unselected (failed) forms
during the long evolutionary
"timescales" of natural selection?
Because light travels considerably faster than sound, during everyday human conversation we see someone moving their lips before we hear the words (even though it's a fraction of a second difference), but our brain synchronises them both to make them match in an accommodating process of audio-visual integration.
Impressive design features like this are found throughout the human body. Here are a few more examples:
- The efficient eye-cleansing system of the tear glands that clean and protect our eyes.
- The sneeze—a reflexive purge of the upper body's irritants, including its cascade of carefully timed and convenient prior warning signals.
- The hiccup—ensuring food solids do not cause obstruction in the gut.
- The vital and comprehensive enteric nervous system responses (our gut's own nervous system).
- The variable sensitivity throughout our bodies that enhance our experience of life, make us responsive, and even keep us alive.
The full list is too long to include here.
How did evolution institute these features; particularly examples of coordination as in the synchronisation of the sound of the human voice with the visual imagery? The different components that these systems consist of exhibit precision, order, impressive arrangement, and complex interdependence. Additionally, many of them are merely enhancements, providing comfort and convenience that is not essential to our survival, thus contradicting the maxim: “survival of the fittest.”
If an undirected, goalless process such as “natural selection” is said to account for these comforts, then a further question arises: From what raw materials did it draw, and by what means were its disparate selections coordinated so as to yield fully integrated, functional systems capable not merely of survival but of the rich comforts characteristic of normal human life?
Where is the empirical evidence that multi-step complex design features like these occur spontaneously, without managed order and arrangement?
But even more interesting: Where is the fossil evidence for the multitude of unselected (failed) forms that were purportedly manifest and available for natural selection during the long geological span of evolutionary timescales?
How could a mechanical process
coordinate complex sensitivity
for comfort and for a variety of purposes,
without “planning” for the body's requirements?
Evolution can neither see nor feel . . .
How did it manage to coordinate
this comprehensive sensitivity throughout our bodies?
(See a greater hurdle for the theory of evolution in the article:
The Symphony Before the Composition)
