Image: Kenn Brown Mondolithic Studios
In Brief
- Routing of nerves and fluid pathways in the human body resembles the tangle of wiring and pipes in an aging house, a heritage from fish and amphibian ancestors.
- The tube through which sperm passes forms a roundabout loop that can lead to hernias, a result of major anatomical changes that occurred as we evolved from fish.
- Nerves that are inherited from fish and travel from the brain to the diaphragm can become irritated and trigger hiccups, a closing of the entryway to the windpipe, an action that itself is a hand-me-down from amphibians that breathe with both lungs and gills.
I started teaching human anatomy at the same time my university renovated my laboratory. As it turns out, this coincidence could not have been more propitious. Teaching anatomy for the first time can be a struggle, and it is not just because there are an enormous number of names to learn. A glimpse inside the body reveals structures left inside of us during the course of evolution, which often seem a confused jumble, with arteries, nerves and other structures taking odd paths to get from one part of the body to another.
While I was struggling to understand the body’s internal structures, I was given space in a 100-year-old building that needed to be renovated into a modern laboratory. When we opened the walls to look at the plumbing, wiring and other mechanicals, we saw a tangle that made no apparent sense; cables, wires and pipes took bizarre loops and turns throughout the building. Nobody in their right mind would have designed my building to conform to the snarled mess we saw when the wall was removed. Constructed in 1896, the utilities reflect an old design that has been jury-rigged for each renovation done over previous decades. If you want to understand the twisting pathways for a cable or a pipe, you have to understand their history and how they have been modified over the years. The same is true for structures in the human body.
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9 Comments
Add CommentInteresting that there are no attempts to refute evolution in response to this article which so wonderfully provides detailed explanations of some of the evidence in its favor.
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Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thishttp://www.evopsych.com
Hah, Intelligent design? Co-locating our reproductive structures with those of our bodily waste disposal facilities is not my idea of imminently Intelligent design. Of course there is the off chance that the design stems from a cruelly ironic intelligence. If that were top be so, then I would like to make the case for calling it Ironic Design or maybe even Cynical Design. Certainly not one of an overly benign or even overly sane variety.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisLudovicus reminds me of the joke whose punch line is: The Intellegent Designer must be a civil engineer because only a CE would put a waste water disposal facility in a recreation area.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI don't know why people think science and religion are mutually exclusive. It's only protestant Christianity, especially the Anabaptist\evangelical variety that will absolutely not accept the biblical account of creation as anything other than 100% literal. On the contrary, the Catholic church teaches that evolution is entirely possible as to how creation came to be what it is. The message from the book of Genesis is simply that God created the universe and saw that it was good. Personally, I believe in God, the Church, and the creeds. Science serves to help me appreciate the complexity of my creator even more.
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Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe article misses the fact that the sperm duct gathers fluid from the prostate on its way up into the body and back down.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisStephen Jay Gould's great essay on science and religion titled "Non-overlapping magisteria is at http://www.stephenjaygould.org/library/gould_noma.html
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisA propos: recreational area: Which of the early Church Fathers was it that texted the following :
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisINTER URINAM Et FAECEM NASCIMUR
(We get born between and betwixt urine and feces)
So much for "intelligent design" - to put people off?
And yet her Ladyship, Donna Evolution seems to think : " If the plumbing' s not broken: why fix it?")