Apparently the human body is so badly designed/evolved that our species currently has, either complete or potential, dominion over every other form of animal life on earth.
Gah.... Humans do NOT have dominion over every other form of life on Earth. We're nowhere near as dominant as bacteria. Earth worms are more dominant than us.
You are aware that chickens domesticated us just as much as we domesticated it? Thanks to being tasty there's about a hundred times more chickens than humans. Wheat is fucken everywhere. Thanks to their ability to domesticate humans in helping it spread. Winning evolution is only about spreading one's genes. That's the winner. You're looking at all of life through with an absurdly narrow human perspective. You're not better than a fish because you can climb trees better than it. Nor are you dominating it.
On that topic. 70% of the Earth's surface is water. Very little is touched by humans. In what way are we dominating it?
At most you can make the case that we dominate the large land mammals (who share our evolutionary niche) of this planet. But that doesn't sound particularly impressive.
You say the job of holding the vertebrae apart against the force of gravity is 'bad design' and not a problem for quadrupeds. But strangely, bipedalism has conferred upon us a huge evolutionary survival advantage. And last time I checked, it's humans holding the leash when dogs go for a walk.
Obviously it has an evolutionary survival advantage. Every aspect of any creature exists because it has a slight advantage of over the next best thing. That's not an argument of perfection or good design. It's not even evidence of half-arsed design. The human bipedal design is what you get when you start with a quadroped monkey and have 3 million years to improve it. For evolution that's not a huge amount of time. Penguins have had 65 million years to improve. So they're better at bipedalism than us.
And again... the fact that humans are holding the leash doesn't mean that we're dominating dogs. Dogs are just as much holding the humans leash, emotionally. We feed them and take care of them, and they do fuck all for us practically. In the modern world they're basically parasites. Who's dominating who here?
our massive arms need a swivelling torso.
Oh yeah. What a pity we can't use that swivelling torso to make proper use of axes and spears and put more body weight behind our swinging fists.
What? We're the weakest primate. By weight we're the weakest and most physically pathetic simian ever to have graced the Earth. No, it's a terrible design. Ask any physiotherapist. Dumb dumb dumb.
But you touched on why we're so weak. Tool use. Muscles are expensive to maintain. Brains also. Because of our tool use we ditched muscle. Since we have a frame adapted to big muscles (we don't have) it leads to lots of muscle damages. Dumb dumb dumb.
...such as the fight or flight response and our brain dumping adrenaline which helps fast-track our focus on a very narrow range of input - instead of all that other irrelevant stuff like how many dots per inch of color a predators fur has.
I am aware of it. But it doesn't answer why? Why can't we have both? Truth and accuracy is always good to have. Why did our designer think that us getting stuff right is of such low priority under stress? Or at any time? We're not built for understanding stuff. We're built for dodging immediate threats.
BTW, our brains use more energy (sugar) than it can physically absorb through eating. So it has to go off-line a third of the day and just lie there helpless and defenceless. Really clever design!
It's like our God designed us to be such poor assessors of reality so that we'd be sure to worship the wrong God.
Yabbut...our vision sucks. We can only see colours that correspond to the ripeness of fruit.
Strangely enough we don't seem to have suffered very much from this handicap. And somehow we have managed to find foods which - when ripe - are completely different colors. Our limited eye sight still manages to cope with yellow fruit, green fruit, red fruit, brown fruit, black fruit, purple fruit..oh, man I'm getting bored with all this variety of color. (BTW - we do actually eat stuff apart from fruit. What color do you prefer your steak cooked)
How do you know? You're literally like a blind man claiming that he's fine with it because there's not much to see anyway.
Ever seen Predator 2? When he fiddles with his computer and comes up with all those cool filters? That's what we could have had. I think it would be very handy indeed.
oh yeah well animals who can see in the infrared band can see through walls. Wouldn't that be handy?
Yeah. Or we could just use our massive brains to build machines that can do the same.
I don't know about you but I'd prefer not to have to have a machine that does it. BTW, I don't know how to build an x-ray machine.
Let me know if you ever come across a snake that can communicate with other snakes on the other side of the world or send spaceships to Mars.
I'm not sure what you think this proves? Does this prove that we wouldn't benefit from x-ray vision? You've got a very confused argument.
Yes curse you God for those ancient methane lakes. Why, why, why!!! Why can't we be like those four-legged dogs and not dry retch when we sniff fecal matter. Why this "useless holdover from way back"? Bilby and DrZoidberg are right. So annoying!
Alas we burdened with the appalling design flaw that hampers our true enjoyment of life's finer things. What do you recommend Dr?
The point is that we have fancy features that are unnecessary. Hardly intelligent design.
I recommend the TV series Cosmos
Ah yes, a TV show about how bad design has hampered the progress of our species.
It doesn't touch on that. It just goes through basic science. But it does it very well, with great visualizations. I'm very well read on science and even I learned some stuff watching that recently. It's great. It's all the more important considering that we're living in a world where the majority are not scientifically literate.
