Mirrored from my post on /r/DebateAChristian. Original post with all the debate content here: https://teddit.net/r/DebateAChristian/comments/maxsa2/the_design_of_the_human_body_is_by_no_means/
Creationists think that the human body is God's magnum opus, meanwhile, we know of many stupid flaws in it, many of which aren't present in other animals. Here are a few, the presence of which suggests that we came to be from a series of blind mutations instead of from a divine creator.
Reproduction
Boy do women get the short end of the stick on this one.
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Babies' heads are too big to be born naturally: Before the advent of safe c-section methods, giving birth was a death defying ordeal because the head of the baby would sometimes be too big to fit through the pelvic bone and/or the birth canal, leading to babies getting stuck and killing both the mother and the baby. I was one of those babies, and had I not been born in modern times, it's likely that both me and my mother would be dead. Most other mammals? Giving birth is both safer and less excruciating, because their babies are smaller compared to the mother. Female hyenas might have it worse though with their pseudo-penis, which is a long, very narrow birth canal that extends quite a ways out of the body. It looks kind of like a penis and is about the same diameter as the actual penis of a male hyena. Not fun when you're giving birth, a successful first birth necessarily involves tearing it.
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Actually, all human babies are technically premature: Compared to other mammals, we are born much less developed and much less ready to survive the outside world, partly because of the previous issue. Compared to animals that can start running with their herd minutes after birth, we're pathetic.
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Ectopic pregnancies: This is when the embryo implants in the Fallopian tube, or in extreme cases, outside the reproductive tract on the intestines or the abdominal wall. It can cause severe bleeding, organ damage, or in the case of the Fallopian tube, can cause it to rupture. It's 100% fatal for the fetus and nearly as fatal for the mother unless an abortion is carried out (and yet, some Christians want to ban abortion for this reason too and just condemn the mother to death for "God's" screw up).
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Testicles are outside of the body: This is because they need to be cooler than body temperature, so at least there's a reason, but it still doesn't exclude it from being a stupid design. Yeah, let's just put one of the most sensitive parts of the male body on the outside, in harm's way. Oh, and if it ruptures, you die without immediate medical treatment.
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The prostate: It's nestled under the bladder and wraps around the urethra, which would be fine if it wasn't so fond of swelling so much, which makes urination very difficult. Many men will experience this in their lives.
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Menstruation: Any woman will tell you that it sucks. Cramps, bleeding, mood swings, the whole nine yards. It's even worse when it goes wrong. It's also wasteful because you lose the nutrients that went into making it. Cats, dogs, and most mammals, on the other hand, also have ovarian cycles, but they reabsorb the endometrium instead of letting it fall off.
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Ovulation: The ovaries eject eggs into the abdomen, and the ends of the Fallopian tubes have to scramble to pick them up. Remember ectopic pregnancies happening outside of the reproductive system? This is the reason, the reproductive tract is not closed off to the rest of the body.
The eyes
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The blood vessels that supply the retina block the retina: The blood vessels that, ya know, keep the retina alive, are in front of the retina. You can even see them if conditions are just right. It's also why we have a blind spot, it's where the blood vessels travel through the retina to the rest of the body. Squid and octopus, on the other hand, do not have this problem.
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Nearsightedness and farsightedness: Are caused by genetic abnormalities in most cases. Need I say more?
Respiration
- We breathe and swallow through the same region of our throat: enough people have choked to death and there are enough warnings about things being choking hazards to make it clear what a bad idea this is.
Bones
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The spine is over-stressed in our upright position and does not support our upper body well: It's why so many people have back problems.
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The bones in our feet look like this. A cat's paws look like this. Which is "designed" more elegantly?
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You can wear out your knees as you age: Again, this is caused by our upright posture. Many older people literally have to get titanium kneecaps, which is kind of awesome, but it still stupid that procedure is necessary.
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Most people's jaws are too small for our full set of teeth: It's why people get their wisdom teeth removed, because they often come in sideways or can't come in at all.
The heart and blood
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Heart attacks: The heart, one of the most important organs of the body, is supplied by a pair of blood vessels not much wider than the ink tube of a ballpoint pen, and there is barely any overlap between the blood vessels, so if any one or its branches get clogged, heart tissue start dying, and don't have the ability to regenerate. This is what a heart attack is. Other animals, like dogs, on the other hand, have it so that the coronary blood supply overlaps, meaning if one branch of the artery gets blocked, the other ones can keep supplying most of the tissue, limiting the severity of heart attacks.
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Blood clots: Sit for too long and blood clots in the veins of your legs. Then they can dislodge and travel to your heart, lungs, brain, etc, and kill you.
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You can kill someone by punching them in the region of the heart at the exact wrong moment: It's called commotio cordis, and is caused by a physical shock, like a punch to the chest, happening at a certain point during the heart's electrical cycle. If triggered, it causes ventricular fibrillation, which can quickly kill you and requires a defibrillator to correct. That's right, you can punch someone in the chest and their heart could break.
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Heart attacks part 2: Why do coronary arteries get blocked? Why, from cholesterol, am essential molecule for our bodies. Too much of the stuff in the blood causes the immune system to freak out, white blood cells go to engulf them, and die from having too much cholesterol in them. Then, they stick to the blood vessel walls, and said walls promptly grow its lining over it, sealing it in. This alone can cause a heart attack, but worse is if the lining above the cholesterol and dead immune cells, called the plaque, breaks open. This activates clotting factors, and bam! Blood clot obstructing nutrient and oxygen flow to the heart! And speaking of immune cells...
The immune system
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Allergies: Happens when the immune system thinks some non-bodily molecule is a deadly pathogen and freaks the absolute f*ck out. People die from allergies every day, and paradoxically, the cleaner your environment is, especially between fetal development and your teens, the more likely it is for you to develop allergies, because the immune system doesn't learn to tolerate benign molecules entering your body. Our family immigrated from China to Canada, where the species of plants are different, and both my dad and I have pollen allergies because our immune systems grew up in China and not in Canada, and freaks out when we encounter pollen from the local plants.
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Autoimmune disorders: Your immune system can also freak the f*ck out at the sight of your own body! It starts attacking it, the results of which can be fatal in severe cases.
Other bodily flaws
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Hyperthyroidism: It's like overclocking a PC, but it's your body, and instead of a clock signal, the thyroid gland starts producing way too much hormones and causes your body to go into overdrive. And just like how you risk burning out your CPU when overclocking, too much thyroid hormones can cause massive health problems.
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Fight or flight activating indiscriminately during stressful periods: Ever been so nervous during a test that you couldn't concentrate? That's because your fight or flight system kicked in, and in doing so, actually inhibits high-level logical reasoning.
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Our bodies can't synthesize vitamin C: Most other mammals can while we have to hope our food contains it. Scurvy was a major killer back in the day.
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We can vomit in our sleep, have it enter our respiratory system, and either choke to death on it or get a massive raging infection. By the way, vomiting is "supposed" to be a mechanism to protect the body.
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We get motion sick by looking at a stationary object (like a book or a phone) while in a moving vehicle, because the mixed sensory signals causes our brain to freak out and think we're hallucinating.
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Appendicitis: Our appendix isn't actually vestigial, it doesn't have any essential functions, but it does help with digestion, keeping the gut microbiome healthy, and even in immune response. However, when it gets infected, it absolutely wrecks house, and can explode and kill you. By the way, appendicitis isn't caused by exercising after eating as is often the myth, but it's most commonly caused by a piece of your stool getting lodged in it. A piece of digested food ending up in a part of your digestive system can kill you. Let that sink in.
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The nerve that controls your larynx, the part of your throat that lets you speak, goes from the brain, down your neck, into your chest, loops around the aorta, comes back up your neck, and over to your throat. All four limbed animals have this, even the giraffe with its massively long neck. This is because four limbed animals evolved from a fish-like organism, which had its throat, aorta and brain right next to each other, so that was the shortest way from brain to throat, but as we evolved into land animals, our aorta moved down, and the nerve followed. Either that or God had a an extra length of nerve like the extra components that Ikea gives you, and decided to put it in just for fun.
Finally, this isn't related to humans, but look up "secondary endosymbiosis". Brown algae, such as kelps, once engulfed the cell of a red algae, which in turn engulfed a cyanobacteria, which acts as its plastid (the thing in the cell that photosynthesizes). So a brown algal cell literally has an entire other eukaryotic cell as an organelle, and inside that endosymbiont, is the engulfed cyanobacteria that does the actual photosynthesis and feeds both layers. Nutrients have to travel through four cell membranes in brown algae to get to the rest of the cell. What kind of intelligent design is this exactly? Why would God choose this mess instead of just sticking the cyanobacteria in the brown algae and calling it a day (presumably out of the seven of them)?
You see all this? The human body (and all living things for that matter), have tons of design flaws, many of which could easily have been avoided if their designer had any intelligence. So why are these flaws here? Because we evolved from genetic mutations in a stunning feat of "good enough". I hope I made the case clear that we really should be ditching creationism for evolution, or at least theistic evolution.
