Friday, October 13, 2006

Can You Design Human Lips?

Sometimes I get fascinated by the intricacies of the human body, and am astounded that anyone could think they just developed by random mistakes over millions of years.

Things like:

- paper cuts that heal themselves. Can you imagine how valuable a car would be that could heal its body of a malevolent keying or of an accidental grocery-cart bumping?

- the waste-disposal process of the latter parts of the alimentary canal. Why would Evolution choose to develop a complicated system of muscles and portals to control the outflow, rather than doing something more simple like simply letting the waste fall out the open end of the tube? Ah yes, of course - [cue 'just-so story' now! - but where's the evidence?].

- human lips. I woke up this morning and at some point in the waking process pursed my lips. Then I focused on that and realized what an awesome portal the human mouth is. What would it take for human engineers to design something similar? The lips can form a water-tight, air-tight barrier, or reshape themselves with deftness to allow air to flow through in various ways in order to whistle a tune. They can wrap around and form air-tight seals around variously shaped objects, such as a round straw, or a host of other shapes. They can be stretched wide into a smile, still retaining their air-tightness, or scrunched into a tightly-wadded pucker. They also have sensors that detect touch, and temperature, and pressure, and moisture.

And the failures? Where in the fossil record, or better yet, where in our everyday experience, are the failures? Surely, if we're constantly evolving, trying out new mutations, why don't we see a world filled with monstrosities, covering the entire range of possibilities from no-lipped, one-eyed, winged dog-cats to four-eyed, eight-legged cat-spiders, to "normal" humans? Instead, we see a world full of variety, but variety that's limited around a relatively few sets of norms. We see all sorts of different types of cats varying around the cat norm, and all sorts of dog types varying around the dog norm, but we don't see that same sort of diversity between the two norms. "Oh well," goes the theory, "those forms became extinct." Okay, fine. But where are the fossils, and not just the piddly onesies-twosies generally dredged up? There should be vastly more intermediate "failures" than there are evolved successes, but I don't see these vast numbers of failures in the fossil record, or walking about the streets. The fossil record, everyday life, and lab research testifies to "limited variation on a theme", not to "infinite imperceptible diversity" as per theory.

Something's wrong with a theory that doesn't match observation, and can't explain the "undesigned" development of lips which brainy human engineers can't begin to duplicate.

Can you design human lips?

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