Biological Design Flaws?
Wisdom Teeth Reflect the Creator’s Foresight
February 1st, 2012
By Dr. FazaleRana
Skeptics often point to human wisdom teeth as an example of a useless human body part. But a new study challenges this evolutionary account.
An impacted wisdom tooth is painful. The agony it causes, however, is not confined to the poor person destined for oral surgery. It also creates discomfort for Christian apologists.
Skeptics often point to human wisdom teeth as an example of a useless human body part. They claim the human body is beleaguered with bad designs (such as the appendix, tonsils, adenoids, the coccyx, body hair), asserting that these structures evince human evolution. Skeptics view these features as vestiges of biological evolution—structures that at one time had use, but lost it as humans descended from evolutionary ancestors.1
When it comes to wisdom teeth many people believe that they serve no useful purpose today. These “third molars” become impacted because of the relatively small size of the human jaw. When the teeth erupt (usually in young adulthood), there is no room for them. In contrast, the Neanderthal jaw was larger and could handle the onset of wisdom teeth. Evolutionary biologists interpret this characteristic to mean that wisdom teeth are leftovers (vestiges) from when humans were another hominid species.2
But a new study challenges this evolutionary account.3A scientist from the UK studied the size and shape of the human jaw of eleven different people groups around the globe––six were agriculturalists and five engaged in a hunter-gatherer lifestyle.
The food that comprises the diet of these two broad categories varies significantly in consistency. Hunter-gatherers eat food that is raw, requiring longer and more intense bouts of chewing. Agriculturalists eat much softer food.
Research reveals that the jaw shape and size differs, depending on the means of subsistence. People who consume a soft diet (typified by an agriculturalist lifestyle) have shorter, broader jaws. Those who consume a hunter-gatherer diet exhibit longer, narrower jaws. The longer, narrower jaws of hunter-gatherers readily accommodate wisdom teeth. Conversely, wisdom teeth don’t easily fit into the mouths of people with shorter, broader jaws.
This result indicates that, fundamentally, the human jaw is designed to house wisdom teeth. For most of human history people employed a hunter-gatherer lifestyle, and impacted wisdom teeth and associated ailments were likely not present. It was only when humans implemented wide-scale agricultural practices that wisdom teeth caused problems. Still, shorter, broader jaws weren’t inevitably a problem. Without dental care until very recently, people throughout human history lost teeth. This tooth loss would provide room for wisdom teeth. And, of course, having replacement molars was welcome at a time when tooth loss was common.
Such advances take the teeth out of another evolutionary argument while sharpening the case for purposeful design.
Subjects: Bad Designs?
Does Inflammation after Injury Traumatize the Case for Intelligent Design?
October 21st, 2010
By Dr. FazaleRana
Nobody likes it when insult is added to injury. But when injury is compounded by inflammation, it is often fatal.
Researchers recently made progress in their understanding of the causes of life-threatening inflammation. It is hoped that this new insight might improve treatment for trauma patients.1Others see this advance in a different light; it seemingly provides potent evidence for the evolutionary framework. They claim that the cause of inflammation is yet another example of a design flaw in nature—something unexpected if life stems from a Designer’s hand. But does this new discovery really cause injury to the case for a Creator?
Inflammation and Trauma
Physical trauma is a major cause of death. In many instances, the patient survives the injury because of medical intervention only to die from a post-traumatic complication known as systemic inflammatory response syndrome (SIRS). The symptoms of SIRS, including fever and shock (increased heart rate and low blood pressure), are highly similar to those caused by a severe bacterial infection.
Systemic inflammation caused by bacteria stems from the body’s response to biomolecules from a microbial agent. The materials generated by the body’s response are known as pathogen-associated molecular patterns (PAMPs). Biomedical scientists note that when patients suffer from traumatic injury, their bodies generate compounds that elicit the immune system in a way similar to the reaction caused by PAMPs. These compounds are referred to as DAMPs (damage-associated molecular patterns). Presumably, severe tissue injury causes DAMPs to be released into the blood, exposing them to the immune system.
The Source of the Inflammatory Response
Researchers from the United States and Great Britain, speculated that the source of DAMPs may be the mitochondria, organelles in the body’s cells. They reasoned—from an evolutionary standpoint—that these organelles, which are thought to have evolved from bacteria a billion years ago, should possess molecules that cause inflammation in the same way bacterial molecules cause sepsis-induced inflammation.
The researchers discovered that DNA and proteins from mitochondria form part of the repertoire of molecules that comprise the DAMPs. Presumably, these biocompounds are released when cells are damaged as a result of severe injury. For example, the researchers
- measured increased levels of the mitochondrial biomolecules in human patients suffering from trauma;
- demonstrated that these compounds attract white blood cells; and
- showed that these materials cause severe inflammation when injected into rats.
Of course, the hope is that this new discovery will stimulate advances that will improve trauma care.
Trauma, Inflammation, and the Case for Biological Evolution
According to the prevailing paradigm in evolutionary biology, mitochondria arose when a bacterial cell was ingested by a burgeoning eukaryotic cell and evolved to be a permanent internal symbiont. If this is the case, then it is reasonable to expect that mitochondrial compounds would, indeed, make up at least part of DAMPs.
It is impressive the evolutionary paradigm would make a prediction that successfully guided research efforts. But just because this prediction has been satisfied doesn’t mean that the similarity between PAMPs and mitochondrial DAMPs has to be understood exclusively from an evolutionary standpoint. This similarity can be readily accommodated as part of a creation model. The shared features of these molecules (which just happen to cause an immune response) could simply reflect the work of a Creator who designed the molecules in mitochondria with the same structural elements as those from bacteria.
It is tempting to view the existence of SIRS-causing materials within the mitochondria as a bad design—a flaw that would be expected only if evolution generated life. It is not a feature that one would anticipate if an all-knowing, all-powerful, all-good Creator made life. (For example, listen to the March 4, 2010 edition of the Nature Podcast, in which this work is described. The interviewer, Natasha Gilbert, states that the body’s response to mitochondrial DMAPs “seems like a bit of a design flaw.”)
In response to this challenge, however, Carl J. Hauser, who helped lead the investigation, disagrees. He argues that the immune response to mitochondria is a well-designed system, because SIRS doesn’t happen all the time, only when severe injury occurs. The SIRS response is avoided because the immune system doesn’t monitor activities inside cells.
In reality, the secondary inflammation that occurs after a severe injury should be inconsequential. It is only a concern because we now have the medical capabilities to keep people alive after trauma occurs. For much of human history this type of medical intervention simply wasn’t available. Even just a few decades ago, nearly everyone who experienced severe injury died. But the hope is that the number of deaths that result from traumatic injury will dramatically decrease now that we know the source of DAMPs.
And as we learn more about biological systems, I hope that the challenges to the design argument diminish as presumed design flaws in biological systems turn out to be elegant constructs.
Endnotes:
1. Qin Zhang et al., “Circulating Mitochondrial DAMPs Cause Inflammatory Responses to Injury,” Nature 464 (2010): 104–7.
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The Redundant Case for Intelligent Design: New Discovery Highlights the Robustness of the Genome
September 9th, 2010
By Dr. FazaleRana
I’m sure many of you have seen a reference at one time or another to “The Department of Redundancy Department.” 1
Image credit: Amazon.com.
It goes without saying that redundancy is generally not considered to be a “good” thing. If something is redundant it is, of course, unnecessary, useless, unneeded, wasteful, etc. Many skeptics view redundancy in biological systems as evidence that blind, undirected evolutionary processes, and not a Creator, formed living systems.
Redundancy does occur in organisms’ genomes. Evolutionary biologists believe redundant pieces of DNA result from biochemical processes that duplicate parts of the genome.
As a case in point, geneticists have discovered that many of the genes responsible for embryonic development also possess multiple enhancer sequences that each appear to control the gene’s expression in a similar fashion. At first glance, multiple enhancers appear a superfluous feature, but new research shows that this is not so. It seems that multiple enhancers actually impart robustness to the developmental process.2
Researchers studied a gene labeled shavenbaby, which plays a role in the embryonic development of the fruit fly, Drosophila. As part of their work, the investigators generated fruit flies that lacked two secondary enhancer sequences. At optimal growth temperatures, the fruit fly embryos with the missing enhancers developed in a normal manner, for the most part—but at higher and lower temperatures development was disrupted.
The researchers found that they could rescue the altered embryos at extreme temperatures if they added extra pieces of DNA to the embryos. Additionally, the researchers noted the same effect when they deleted the secondary enhancers associated with the developmental gene wingless. These results suggest that redundancy in the enhancer sequences imparts robustness to the development process (particularly when it occurs in non-optimal environments) and can be regarded as an elegant design feature of the Drosophila genome.
Redundancy and the Case for Intelligent Design
Even though redundancy is often viewed in a negative light, sometimes human engineers intentionally design systems with redundant components. On this basis, as I point out in The Cell’s Design, it can be argued that biochemical redundancy is a good design feature.
Redundancy is not incorporated into human designs in an aimless fashion; it’s well-thought out. Because of cost and efficiency concerns, engineers introduce redundant components into their designs judiciously, limiting them to only those parts that are critical for the systems operation.
When engineers incorporate duplicate parts into their designs, they typically engineer the system so that one of the duplicate parts functions as the primary system and the other as a backup. Only the primary system is active, while the backup system is held in reserve, kicking into operation only if the primary system fails. Engineers refer to this type of system as a responsive backup circuit.
And this appears to be how the secondary enhancers operate in the Drosophila genome. Rather than representing the unthinking randomness of evolutionary processes, secondary enhancers provide evidence that life is the product of a Creator’s thoughtful handiwork.
Endnotes:
1. To order a set of “Department of Redundancy Department” mugs, go here.
2. Nicolás Frankel et al., “Phenotypic Robustness Conferred by Apparently Redundant Transcriptional Enhancers,” Nature 466 (July 22, 2010): 490–93.
Design with a Purpose
July 9th, 2010
By Guest Author
by Brad Sargent, PhD
My back hurts this morning—another unwanted sign that my 50th birthday is rapidly approaching. And my eyesight—where are those reading glasses?
The human body is an amazing thing but, as I’m increasingly aware, it has its flaws. Some of the flaws in humans and all biological organisms are used as arguments against the divine design of life on Earth. After all, in Psalm 139, the Bible claims,
For you created my inmost being;
you knit me together in my mother's womb.
I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made;
your works are wonderful,
I know that full well.
Atheists like Richard Dawkins and the late Stephen Jay Gould claim that if God is so good and so smart, then he would have done a better job designing the world around us. Gould’s book The Panda’s Thumb1 criticizes the design of the panda’s thumb as a case of poor engineering. Meanwhile in The Blind Watchmaker, Dawkins takes issue with the design of the human eye.2 A quick search of the Internet will produce more examples of so-called “bad designs.” For many people, the God they envision would have done a better job at creation; therefore, God can’t be responsible for life as we see it.
As a designer of medical devices, I believe that critics like Dawkins use the wrong criteria to decide what is and is not a good design. Every engineer tends to criticize how another engineer solved a problem. By nature, we like to believe we could have done a better job. But many times it turns out we just didn’t understand the problem well enough to judge. It is interesting to see how many supposed examples of bad design in nature turn out to be better than we initially understood. The complexity of a problem takes time to understand because of the subtle interaction between the parts of a system.
The panda’s thumb and the human eye are prime examples of misunderstood designs. The more we study them, the more they exhibit good design. For example, the panda’s thumb doesn’t have the versatility and capability of the human thumb, but it works well for the repetitive motion of stripping bamboo leaves. The human thumb couldn’t take that kind of constant stress.3
As another example, the high density of rods and cones in the human eye requires an increased blood flow to the retina. This requirement means the neural connections must face outward, toward incoming light.4 We now know that the human eye elegantly compensates for the inverted retina with special cells that channel light past the neurons and down to the rods and cones.5 Some researchers theorize that the inverted retina provides better blood flow to the rods and cones and allows for better neural processing.6
Both of these examples should serve as a warning to avoid being hasty in declaring a design “bad” simply because it wasn’t engineered the way we think it should have been. (The fault for other supposed design flaws—like my need for glasses—rests more on corrupted manufacturing instructions than an actual flaw.)
We must also keep in mind that all designs require tradeoffs. At the company where I work, when a client brings us an idea for a new or improved product, the first step is defining the specifications for the new device. For medical devices, this is an essential part of the FDA Design Control process. The exercise usually starts like writing a wish list for Santa. Our experienced clients know they can’t have it all, but figure why not aim high? Everyone wants the new device to be better than the competition. The product must be smaller yet have longer battery life and a bigger display, be lighter yet more rugged and durable, be simpler and easier to use yet include more features. And, of course, it should be cheaper, too.
It can be fun trying to achieve what seems impossible. In the end, however, you have to prioritize the most important features. The key is clear understanding of the goals. I’ve seen many development projects lose focus because the design team didn’t understand the real goals of their project. Too often, good engineering effort goes into achieving unnecessary features while crucial ones are missed.
Interestingly, the FDA regulations for verification and validation testing of medical products does not focus on determining if a device is “perfect” in some absolute way. Rather, they require (1) that the product’s physical and operational requirements are specified clearly; and (2) that the device is tested thoroughly to see that it truly meets those specifications. In essence, the regulations ask, “Are the goals clearly defined and does the device meet those intended goals?”
Going back to “bad” designs in nature, I believe the comparison with man-made engineering should change the scope and focus of how we view organisms’ functions and operations. We need to avoid looking at whether a particular biochemical process is as efficient as it could be (according to us) or at whether a particular organism is as well suited to its environment as it could be. Instead, we need to ask, “Does that organism or process fulfill its purpose in the overall system we call life on Earth?”