Jerry Coyne has a post commenting on a review of his book Why Evolution Is True at the BioLogos site. Jerry is always funny, and not at all deserving of his reputation in some circles as a misanthrope. If you read the WEIT blog regularly, you’ll know that he’s always picking on these folks for mixing up religion and science. Poor folks! Why can’t the biologists just let the BioLogos crowd be so they can go on reconciling God with His creation in peace and quiet?

Well, because He did a pretty bad job of it. And Jerry has a little list:

Organisms are full of flaws.  Considering only humans, we have descending testicles that can cause problems, very difficult childbirth in females, vestigial wisdom teeth (and appendixes) that can become impacted or infected, and our recurrent laryngeal nerve, which, instead of connecting the brain and larynx by the shortest route, loops way down around the heart and comes back up again.  These are not features an intelligent designer would have given us. But those features are completely understandable in light of evolution.  The nerve, for example, was constrained to form a long loop because a blood vessel moved backwards during our evolution from fishy ancestors, forcing the nerve (which once lay next to that vessel) to elongate around it to retain its connection with the larynx.

I’m always wondering how IDers and their ilk can reconcile a benevolent designer with…childbirth. Any man who’s ever seen a woman go through labor knows what I’m talking about. It’s torture. Not to mention the women who’ve actually gone through it. I’m surprised they aren’t all atheists. Maybe there’s a T-shirt in that thought.

Here’s my limerick about it:

If life on this earth was designed
with all of us neatly in mind
why isn’t it clear
just why we are here,
not to mention the crippled and blind?

If there’s an intelligent designer, I want my money back.