Fear and loathing of design?

Medicine and Our "Perfect" Anatomy

Evolution News & Views 

Check out the title on this article from the current issue of the Journal of Experimental Zoology Part B: "Links Between Evolution, Development, Human Anatomy, Pathology, and Medicine, with a Proposition of a Re-defined Anatomical Position and Notes on Constraints and Morphological 'Imperfections,'" by Diogo and Molnar. The word in scare quotes, "imperfections," is your tipoff.

From the Abstract (emphasis added):

Surprisingly the oldest formal discipline in medicine (anatomy) has not yet felt the full impact of evolutionary developmental biology. In medical anatomy courses and textbooks, the human body is still too often described as though it is a "perfect machine." In fact, the study of human anatomy predates evolutionary theory; therefore, many of its conventions continue to be outdated, making it difficult to study, understand, and treat the human body, and to compare it with that of other, nonbipedal animals, including other primates. Moreover, such an erroneous view of our anatomy as "perfect" can be used to fuel nonevolutionary ideologies such as intelligent design.

Where to start? ID isn't an ideology, but a scientific reading of the agreed evidence of biology and other disciplines. It's not "non-evolutionary" -- at least they didn't say "anti-evolution" or "anti-science." Arguably, ID is atheory of evolution, inferring a cause behind life's long history of change, just not a Darwinian theory that insists on biology as the product of blind churning.

Beyond these familiar points, we don't know of any anatomy textbook -- certainly none we have ever seen or owned -- that describes human anatomy as "perfect."

Medical practice, physiology, anatomy, and other sciences of the human body do require, of course, concepts of normal structure and function, in order to have any sort of metric for assessing disease, etc. This isn't prima facie a question of ID or not, but simply what the logic of "healthy/diseased" necessitates.

What about the notion that medicine, being weighed down by a faulty view of our anatomy as "perfect," finds it "difficult" to "compare [the human body] with that of other, nonbipedal animals"? No, nursing students dissect cats, not humans, precisely because of their parallels (and less expense). Any medical student who went through AP and college biology likely had to dissect a fetal pig. Who says there are no comparisons made?

Design, anyway, is an inference to the best explanation for bodies. Whatever kind.

What Diogo and Molnar seem to want is a metric with The Human Body as God Would (or Should) Have Made It at one end of the measuring stick. As Dilley and Nelson have pointed out, contemporary Darwinian evolutionary thinking borrows heavily from theology for its justification -- a borrowing, incidentally, to which the theory is strictly not entitled, given the rule of methodological naturalism.