Errors in Evolution
This piece ran in my local paper over the weekend, but I like this version better because it’s not as heavily edited. Please to enjoy:
Story of evolution can be seen as comedy of errors –
Scientists say intelligent design doesn’t account for amusing anatomical quirks
Philadelphia InquirerPHILADELPHIA — “Oh what a piece of work is man,” wrote Shakespeare, long before Darwin suggested just how little work went into us. Somehow, that same process that gave us reason, language and art also left us with hernias, flatulence and hiccups.
One argument scientists often make against so-called intelligent design — the idea that evolution cannot by itself explain life — is that on closer inspection, we look like we’ve been put together by someone who didn’t read the manual, or at least did a somewhat sloppy job of things.
Viewed as products of evolution, however, our anatomical quirks start to make sense, says University of Chicago fossil hunter and anatomy professor Neil Shubin, author of the recent book Your Inner Fish. And by focusing on our less lofty traits, evolutionary biology can help dispel one of the most egregious and even tragic fallacies surrounding Darwinian evolution — that it moves toward perfection, with man at the apex of some towering ladder.
Evolution of hiccups
That misreading of evolution has been connected to the eugenics movement of the early 20th century, with the Nazis extending the man-as-ideal notion to blue-eyed blond German-man-as-ideal notion.”Darwin didn’t believe it, but some, who saw it through a more religious light, tended to want to interpret evolution as a steady march toward the pinnacle of humanity,” says University of Pennsylvania ethicist Art Caplan, who has written extensively on the eugenics movement.
By today’s understanding, evolution by natural selection doesn’t march toward anything — it just modifies existing creatures to better compete in ever-shifting environments.
Understanding something as seemingly trivial as the evolution of hiccups can help clear up some profound misperceptions on the nature of life and humanity.
The sound of a hiccup echoes back to our very distant past as fish and amphibians some 375 million years ago, says Shubin. It’s really just a spasm that causes a sharp intake of breath followed by a quick partial closing of our upper airway with that flap of skin known as the glottis. It’s best if you can nip it in the first couple of hics, he says.
It’s much harder to stop once you’ve let yourself get up to 10. By that point you’ve reverted to an ancient breathing pattern orchestrated by the brain stem that once helped amphibians breath, letting water pass the gills without leaking into the lungs.
“Tadpoles normally breathe with something like a hiccup,” Shubin says.
The theme of his book is that we owe much of our anatomy to our animal ancestors. “Parts that evolved in one setting are now jury-rigged to work in another,” he says. “When you look at the human body, you see layer after layer of history inside of us.”
The first layer is what we share with chimpanzees and gorillas. The next goes back to mice and cows, while further down, you get to the relatively underappreciated layers we share with fish — which include the backbone and basic layout of the body.
More at the Houston Chronicle -
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/nation/5732109.html
Pick up the book on Amazon -
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