“Twisted” human birth canal “evolved” to be good design

BA77: [Off-Topic] I don't know if you've read this paper, but I think you'll find it interesting if you haven't. I'm very much taken with the latest stuff from Gerard 't Hooft. You can visit his website. Good health, and good reading! P.S. Here's a YouTube video of 't Hooft on his quantum viewpoint, if you're so inclined. PaV

Martin_r: I've seen that episode. Very funny stuff. PaV

Aarceng For millions of years before the twisted birth canal evolved all human babies died during delivery.

Now we know why storks used to bring babies until the problems of birth canal were solved. Sandy

PaV @5

This is not science. This is a belief system.

i can recall a very funny moment from THE BIG BANG THEORY sitcom: Sheldon Cooper: "Oh Great, now I'm worse than a fraud. I'm practically a biologist." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k0kk37iFgWk martin_r

What's remarkable is the morality play the Darwinists always play. They always see 'good' and 'evil.' If something doesn't conform to their thinking, then it's 'evil,' and that makes God evil since this is due to "bad design." But when they find that what they've determined to be 'evil' is actually 'good,' then they say: "See, now we know why this 'good' design "evolved." "Heads I win; tails you lose!" "If it's 'evil,' this proves that God doesn't exist; if it's 'good,' this proves that RM/V+NS can do anything--that is, 'Who needs God!'" Morality play from top to bottom. This is not science. This is a belief system. PaV

Both explanations are unsatisfying. I don't know the real reason for this design, but I'd bet against both of these versions. polistra

For millions of years before the twisted birth canal evolved all human babies died during delivery. aarceng

“Twisted” Human Birth Canal “Evolved” To Be Good Design

this is Darwinism.... these guys are always wrong ... but this is how it ends, when a bunch of natural science graduates (biologists, archeologists, peleontologists, and other 'logists' ), with 19th century thinking, making unqualified claims about very technical/engineered stuff ... These Darwinists, FOR SOME UNKNOWN REASON, think, that they are qualified enough to review such an advanced design (a design beyond human comprehension) ... martin_r

Aside from the obvious intelligent design of the birth canal itself, and as to the overall Darwinian claim, i.e. 'just so story', that upright walking evolved simply because of the "efficiency of the bipedal locomotion", well that Darwinian claim, i.e. 'just so story', like all other Darwinian 'just so stories', is found to be in conflict with the actual empirical evidence. Specifically, it is now found, contrary to Darwinian claims, that "the efficiency of human walking and running is not so different from other mammals."

Energy Efficiency Doesn’t Explain Human Walking? Sept. 17, 2012 Excerpt: Why hominids evolved upright walking is one of the biggest questions in human evolution. One school of thought suggests that bipedalism was the most energetically efficient way for our ancestors to travel as grasslands expanded and forests shrank across Africa some five million to seven million years ago. A new study in the Journal of Human Evolution challenges that claim, concluding that the efficiency of human walking and running is not so different from other mammals.?Physiologists Lewis Halsey of the University of Roehampton in England and Craig White of the University of Queensland in Australia compared the efficiency of human locomotion to that of 80 species of mammals, including monkeys, rodents, horses, bears and elephants.,,, To evaluate whether energy efficiency played a role in the evolution of upright walking, Halsey and White note that hominids should be compared to their closest relatives. For example, if human walking is more efficient than chimpanzee walking than you would expect based on chance alone, then it lends support to the energy-efficiency explanation. But that’s not what the researchers found. In fact, the energetic differences between humans and chimpanzees are smaller than the differences between very closely related species that share the same type of locomotion, such as red deer versus reindeer or African dogs versus Arctic foxes. In some cases, even different species within the same genus, such as different types of chipmunks, have greater variation in their walking efficiencies than humans and chimps do. http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/hominids/2012/09/energy-efficiency-doesnt-explain-human-walking/

Moreover, the following finding also blew another hole in the Darwinian 'just-so story' that humans evolved to stand upright when the forests of East Africa turned to savannas.

Another Difficulty with Darwinian Accounts of How Human Bipedalism Developed - David Klinghoffer - February 21, 2013 Excerpt: A Darwinian evolutionary bedtime story tells of how proto-man achieved his upright walking status when the forests of his native East Africa turned to savannas. That was 4 to 6 million years ago, and the theory was that our ancestors stood up in order to be able to look around themselves over the sea of grasslands, which would have been irrelevant in the forests of old.?A team of researchers led by USC's Sarah J. Feakins, writing in the journal Geology, detonate that tidy explanation with their finding that the savannas, going back 12 million years, had already been there more than 6 million years when the (supposed) wonderful transition to bipedalism took place ("Northeast African vegetation change over 12 m.y."). http://www.evolutionnews.org/2013/02/another_difficu069411.html

In short, it is easy for Darwinists to deceive themselves and others with their imaginative 'just-so stories' for how this or that trait may have evolved, but putting those imaginative 'just-so stories' to the test is other matter entirely. As the late Austin L. Hughes, Distinguished Professor of Biological Sciences at the University of South Carolina, stated, "it is not enough to construct a story about how the trait might have evolved in response to a given selection pressure; rather, one must provide some sort of evidence that it really did so evolve. This is a very tall order.…”

“... another common misuse of evolutionary ideas: namely, the idea that some trait must have evolved merely because we can imagine a scenario under which possession of that trait would have been advantageous to fitness... Such forays into evolutionary explanation amount ultimately to storytelling... it is not enough to construct a story about how the trait might have evolved in response to a given selection pressure; rather, one must provide some sort of evidence that it really did so evolve. This is a very tall order.…” — Austin L. Hughes, The Folly of Scientism - The New Atlantis, Fall 2012

Here are some supplemental notes as to how Darwinists constantly confuse their imaginative 'just-so stories' with actual empirical science.

"The earliest fossils of Homo, Homo rudolfensis and Homo erectus, are separated from Australopithecus by a large, unbridged gap. How can we explain this seeming saltation? Not having any fossils that can serve as missing links, we have to fall back on the time-honored method of historical science, the construction of a historical narrative." - Ernst Mayr - What Makes Biology Unique?, p. 198 (2004). Sociobiology: The Art of Story Telling – Stephen Jay Gould – 1978 – New Scientist Excerpt: Rudyard Kipling asked how the leopard got its spots, the rhino its wrinkled skin. He called his answers “Just So stories”. When evolutionists study individual adaptations, when they try to explain form and behaviour by reconstructing history and assessing current utility, they also tell just so stories – and the agent is natural selection. Virtuosity in invention replaces testability as the criterion for acceptance. https://books.google.com/books?id=tRj7EyRFVqYC&pg=PA530 In Darwin, the Descent of a PR Man Neil Thomas - August 19, 2021 Excerpt: When Darwin makes the attempt to explain the crucial point of The Descent of Man, humankind’s supposed descent from ape-like ancestors, he speculates somewhat vaguely on the question of whence we as a species got our superior brains: “The mental powers of some earlier progenitor of man must have been more highly developed than in any existing ape, before even the most imperfect form of speech could have come into use; but we may confidently believe that the continued use and advancement of this power would have reacted on the mind itself, by enabling and encouraging it to carry on long trains of thought.”1 A Just-So Story The passage has the disconcerting tone of a just-so story. How, one might legitimately ask, did one ape “happen” to get its superior cognitive capacities? What was the vera causa of its braininess? And how did this cognitive superiority trigger correlated changes in the brain? In the light of present-day scientific advances, these seem like shallow assertions, inadequate to account for what we know about those labyrinthine co-adaptive changes necessary for the process he describes to function effectively. On another point, this passage and many others like it would be a gift to linguistic specialists in discourse analysis or to those whose specialty is in the deconstruction of advertising propaganda. Darwin’s reiteration here and elsewhere of the phrase “we may confidently believe” veils the tenuous truth-value of what he proposes, which is finally little better than a guess. This mode of assertion is uncomfortably reminiscent of the wearisomely repeated phrase of the ex-PR-man turned Prime Minister of Great Britain, David Cameron: “Let us be clear” — which you just knew was going to be the rhetorical prelude to his making a partisan point vulnerable to all those objections he was trying to head off. Nothing New for Darwin Such rhetorical legerdemain was nothing new for Darwin. He had recourse to it more than a few times in the Origin. We find it in evidence, for example, where he seeks to persuade us that the eye was not designed but somehow fell into place as the result of a myriad of chance selections over time:,,, - Neil Thomas is a Reader Emeritus in the University of Durham, England,,, He also taught modules on the propagandist use of the German language used both by the Nazis and by the functionaries of the old German Democratic Republic.,,, https://evolutionnews.org/2021/08/in-darwin-the-descent-of-a-pr-man/ EVOLUTIONARY JUST-SO STORIES Excerpt: ,,,The term “just-so story” was popularized by Rudyard Kipling’s 1902 book by that title which contained fictional stories for children. Kipling says the camel got his hump as a punishment for refusing to work, the leopard’s spots were painted on him by an Ethiopian, and the kangaroo got its powerful hind legs after being chased all day by a dingo.?Kipling’s just-so stories are as scientific as the Darwinian accounts of how the amoeba became a man.?Lacking real scientific evidence for their theory, evolutionists have used the just-so story to great effect. Backed by impressive scientific credentials, the Darwinian just-so story has the aura of respectability.?Biologist Michael Behe observes:? “Some evolutionary biologists--like Richard Dawkins--have fertile imaginations. Given a starting point, they almost always can spin a story to get to any biological structure you wish” (Michael Behe - Darwin’s Black Box).,,, http://www.wayoflife.org/database/evolutionary_just_so_stories.html "Here, as elsewhere, I found that Darwin’s theory had provided no discernible guidance, but was brought in, after the breakthroughs, as an interesting narrative gloss. In the peer-reviewed literature, the word “evolution” often occurs as a sort of coda to academic papers in experimental biology. Is the term integral or superfluous to the substance of these papers? To find out, I substituted for “evolution” some other word – “Buddhism,” “Aztec cosmology,” or even “creationism.” I found that the substitution never touched the paper’s core. This did not surprise me. From my conversations with leading researchers it had became clear that modern experimental biology gains its strength from the availability of new instruments and methodologies, not from an immersion in historical biology.,,, Darwinian evolution – whatever its other virtues – does not provide a fruitful heuristic in experimental biology.” - Philip S. Skell – (the late) Emeritus Evan Pugh Professor at Pennsylvania State University, and a member of the National Academy of Sciences. – Why Do We Invoke Darwin? – 2005 Darwin’s Theory of Natural Selection Has Left a Legacy of Confusion over Biological Adaptation Brian Miller – September 20, 2021 Excerpt: Evolutionary biologist Robert Reid stated: “Indeed the language of neo-Darwinism is so careless that the words ‘divine plan’ can be substituted for ‘selection pressure’ in any popular work in the biological literature without the slightest disruption in the logical flow of argument.” Robert Reid, Biological Emergences: Evolution by Natural Experiment, PP. 37-38 To fully comprehend the critique, one simply needs to imagine attempting to craft an evolutionary barometer that measures the selection pressure driving one organism to transform into something different (e.g., fish into an amphibian). The fact that no such instrument could be constructed highlights the fictitious nature of such mystical forces. https://evolutionnews.org/2021/09/darwins-theory-of-natural-selection-has-left-a-legacy-of-confusion-over-biological-adaptation/ Atheist and Darwinian Science and Story Telling, part 1 of 9 Excerpt: (Darwinists) must deal with the fact that abiogenesis (abiotic synthesis) is not observed anywhere and is not producible in any experiments (and if it was it would be evidence of intelligent design).,,, What is their answer? They can imagine a time, long, long ago in the Earth’s past, when everything happened just so and abiogenesis was possible. What about filling the various gaps in our knowledge? They can imagine a time in the distant future when their beliefs will be proven true: in other words they think that eventually material causes will be discovered for all material effects including the universe itself.,, Herein lies the fallacies: they merely regress to an unknown past in which they can imagine thing occurring that do not occur today (what happened to uniformitarianism?) and they can project into an equally unknown future at which time we will discover that absolute materialism is true. Atheists of this sort appeal to inaccessible, unobserved, un-experimented upon, ideal and self-service concepts and replace evidence for imagination. As long as they can imagine it, it must be true: this appears to be what Richard Dawkins meant by being an intellectually fulfilled atheist. https://truefreethinker.com/atheist-and-darwinian-science-and-story-telling-part-1-of-9/

In short, and in conclusion, Darwinists, intentionally or not, constantly confuse their imaginary 'just-so stories' with actual empirical science. Darwinists simply have no evidence that Darwinian processes can create anything, not even a single protein, much less do they have any evidence that Darwinian processes can actually produce any particular trait in question, such as the intricacies of the birth canal..

2 Corinthians 10:5 Casting down imaginations, and every high thing that exalteth itself against the knowledge of God, and bringing into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ;

Of humorous supplemental note, the entire atheistic worldview, (including the atheist himself), turns into a realm of imaginations and illusions, with nothing 'real' for the atheist to grab onto.

Basically, because of reductive materialism (and/or methodological naturalism), the atheistic materialist (who believes Darwinian evolution to be true) is forced to claim that he is merely a ‘neuronal illusion’ (Coyne, Dennett, etc..), who has the illusion of free will (Harris), who has unreliable, (i.e. illusory), beliefs about reality (Plantinga), who has illusory perceptions of reality (Hoffman), who, since he has no real time empirical evidence substantiating his grandiose claims, must make up illusory “just so stories” with the illusory, and impotent, ‘designer substitute’ of natural selection (Behe, Gould, Sternberg), so as to ‘explain away’ the appearance (i.e. the illusion) of design (Crick, Dawkins), and who also must make up illusory meanings and purposes for his life since the hopelessness of the nihilism inherent in his atheistic worldview is simply too much for him to bear (Weikart), and who must also hold morality to be subjective and illusory since he has rejected God (Craig, Kreeft). Who, since beauty cannot be grounded within his materialistic worldview, must also hold beauty itself to be illusory (Darwin). Bottom line, nothing is truly real in the atheist’s worldview, least of all, beauty, morality, meaning and purposes for life.,,, April 18, 2021 - Detailed Defense of each claim https://uncommondesc.wpengine.com/philosophy/philosopher-mary-midgeley-1919-2018-on-scientism/#comment-728595

Thus, although the Darwinian Atheist and/or Methodological Naturalist may firmly believe that he is on the terra firma of science (in his appeal, even demand, for naturalistic explanations over and above God as a viable explanation), the fact of the matter is that, when examining the details of his materialistic/naturalistic worldview, it is found that Darwinists/Atheists themselves are adrift in an ocean of fantasy and imagination with no discernible anchor for reality to grab on to. It would be hard to fathom a worldview more antagonistic to modern science, indeed more antagonistic to reality itself, than Atheistic materialism and/or methodological naturalism have turned out to be. bornagain77