Intelligent design and the epiglottis

Regarding the article "Intelligent design? No smart engineer designed our bodies," Professor Sherman sees a lack of intelligent design in the human respiratory and digestive systems. See, both air and food pass, for a short time, through the same passageway, the throat, before being directed to the windpipe and esophagus, respectively. That last bite might go down the wrong tube (I guess it's just a toss of the coin) causing you to choke!

Has Professor Sherman ever heard of the epiglottis ? I understand this little thing works marvelously to help prevent such mishaps.

Now it's true that if I try to overrule these systems by talking/breathing and swallowing at the same time I might experience unpleasant effects (Mom always told me never to speak with my mouth full!). But that's not the system's fault. Similarly, if my careless driving causes a traffic accident, I don't conclude that my car and/or the highway system lacked any intelligent design.

Professor Sherman certainly has an interesting idea on how to fix or improve the crazy, chaotic quilt, the pathetic patchwork that is the human body: "Put your mouth in your forehead or your nasal opening in your throat." Now that's design, that's progress, that's Darwinian science!

(How about that's entertainment !) Anybody out there want to be the first guinea pig?

God help those Cornell premed students. Maybe they can still get their money back.

-- Martin Kurlich 
Endwell, N.Y.


Paul Sherman and Janet Shellman respond:

We thank Mr. Kurlich for his enthusiastic comments. Of course he is correct that the function of the epiglottis is to seal off the trachea when we swallow.

Nonetheless, as everybody knows, food and water sometimes go down the wrong pipe, and we choke. If whatever is blocking the windpipe isn't dislodged quickly, by spasmodic coughing or a friend's timely Heimlich maneuver, we'll suffocate. In fact, every year about one child or adult in a hundred thousand chokes to death.

Certainly this mortality rate is small compared to that from automobile accidents, but couldn't it be avoided by a more "intelligent" design? After all many invertebrates, including insects and clams, have a safer arrangement: complete separation of their respiratory and digestive systems. But in all vertebrates the pathways for air and food crisscross. This design "flaw" is the result of natural selection acting on small variations in the structures of preexisting ancestors, and evolutionary compromises between alternative survival mechanisms, rather than engineering perfection.

The students that participated in our fall term seminar on Darwinian medicine debated this and many similar issues. The purpose of this class was not merely to accumulate medical facts, but also to develop and critically analyze alternative hypotheses to explain the probable history and reproductive consequences of bodily structures and symptoms.


To which Kurlich responds:

Continuing with Professors Sherman and Shellman's Darwinian focus on choking, I suppose they feel that, as with everything else, the "spasmodic coughing reaction" is an evolutionary development. If so, I'm thinking this potential "white knight to the rescue" must have evolved pretty quickly, like in a couple seconds! Otherwise, that very first vertebrate organism to experience choking would likely have suffocated. Absent such "immediate evolution" we'd have to assume this strange, apparently pointless coughing mechanism was evolved (and retained for who knows how many millions of years) in anticipation of future choking experiences. But of course, we "know" evolution is mindless; it doesn't think or plan. Hmmm.

Gee, if we just had a better "design." Oh, to be an insect or clam!! (Is this the source of that expression "Happy as a clam"?)

I was comforted to see the professors use the word "hypotheses." Yet in the same breath, they say our "design flaw" is the product of evolution. Hmmm. So, we've never observed such biological systems evolve and can only hypothesize how they might have done so, yet we know they resulted from the evolutionary process. This is science? I thought the "know" is supposed to come after the proof.

And I love the professors' use of anthropomorphism: "evolutionary compromises between alternativesurvival mechanisms rather than engineering perfection" (my emphases). As if Mr. Evolution engages in thoughtful decision-making, with intelligent evaluation of tradeoffs?

What's most startling is the professors' presenting "Darwinian medicine" as an exciting and promising new field of science. (Maybe even some federal funding on the way?) Exactly what is the benefit of engaging in these flights of Darwinian imagination? If we can just figure out which monkey you came from we'll know what prescription to write? Perhaps Darwinian medicine will do away with real medicine altogether. After all, whether it's morning sickness or cancer or a fever, it's all natural, it's all good, man! Let it be, let it be. The fittest will survive. Don't fight against Mother Nature/Mr. Evolution!

Dec. 19, 2005

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