The Huge Entity: Mu Haiku: The Intelligent Designer's Mistake Motivation

Mu Haiku: The Intelligent Designer's Mistake Motivation

Thursday, November 10, 2005 → by Danieru

Yes, it's Mu Haiku time again at The Huge Entity! Get your brains at the ready and your contemplative consciousnesses engaged. A real nonsense splitter today:

"The US state of Kansas has ruled that science classes in public schools should include the teaching of intelligent design and the doubts it casts on Darwinian evolution. The move has dismayed the nation's scientific community." - link

But wait a minute, as we bow our heads in respect for the loss of rationality shouldn't we also be celebrating the new opportunities an evolution free universe holds for the scientific process? [Bear with me here, I'm not condoning ID nonsense just yet...]

If The Designer is now legally a testable hypothesis (at least in Kansas), it must also presumably contain some observable premises we can use to come up with new and better theories - for this IS how the scientific method is meant to be applied. Now that ID is legally science we'll have to start treating it that way.

The Argument:

1. The intelligent designer formed life, and in doing so left traces of something we misperceived as 'evolution'.
2. The 'evidence' of 'evolution' we misperceived does not fit properly with our 'theory', as this court case concludes, therefore every scrap of evidence that was collected is actually better applied to questioning the existence of The Intelligent Designer him/it-self.
3. Thus we must conclude that all the imperfections inherent in just about every species of flora and fauna on this planet were mistakes made by our supposedly 'intelligent' designer and not by the errors collected over countless generations by random and non-planned mutation within the now defunct 'evolutionary process'.

What then caused the intelligent designer to make these mistakes? It can't have been stupidity, for surely THE Intelligent Designer is everything but stupid. I do have a few other ideas though.

The Motivation Behind The Mistakes:

He was the ultimate procrastinator: The Designer kept putting off his work until he hardly had time to re-design that defective human sinus system or reroute that male urethra so that it didn't pass right through the prostate gland. Happens to the most driven of us, why not the very very most driven?
He was a lazy git: He just couldn't be arsed finishing his jobs. Flying Squirrels, for all their half-falling / half-flying are just not worth the effort.
He ran out of time: Truly 6 days, even in designer-heaven, ain't a long time. So ok, he decided on a gas for his creatures to breath, but by the time he realised that the very same oxygen supply that kept them alive was also slowly killing the creatures that absorbed it the 7th day was upon him. No work on the designer-Sabbath for Mr. Designer, oh no.
He ran out of ideas: When you've seen over 900 species of bats you've seen them all.
He was just joking: Yeah, I suppose inverting the human retina to give us a blind-spot, but not doing the same to the octopus might have been kind of funny at the time.
He had better things to do: We forget that life came later on in the designer's universal project. What about the rocks? Putting down all those layers of sediment must have taken a bloody long time.

...

and so on

So this week's Mu Haiku mission, should you choose to accept it, is to ponder the evidence some more. Why did The Intelligent One make so many 'mistakes'? Let's see what the ID advocates themselves have to say on evidence:

"The critical thinking and precision of science began to really affect my ability to just believe something without any tangible evidence..." - Salvador Cordova - quoted in Nature

Mu to that!

UPDATE: Someone has answered my question... It's all about Incompetent Design.

Many thanks to Sceptico, Pharyngula, Panda's Thumb and everyone linked above!
Categories: Intelligent Design, Religion, Science, Darwinism, Evolution, Creationism, News, Politics, Humour, Kansas, Education, Nonsense, Meme, Mu, Haiku

Labels: Mu Haiku

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posted by Danieru at 1:05 PM

Danieru said...

Here's my first 5-7-5 Mu depiction:

Designing is dull.
An entity that bright got
better things to do

November 10, 2005 3:41 PM

What is the process behind Mu Haiku? Here's an idea:

Mu is a Japanese and Chinese word regarding an absence of/in the negative. When one desires an answer, but your question makes false assumptions, the answer can only be Mu. A radical change of perspective is required before the Mu can be overcome.

Now GET WRITING!

November 11, 2005 5:11 AM

Jennyology said...

Will religion rule
all science? I hope
it's just in Kansas

November 11, 2005 6:10 AM

woops! missed some syllables in there, let's pretend my question had some false assumptions and the lack is the resultant mu...

November 11, 2005 6:14 AM

Anonymous said...

Or perhaps the Intelligence isnt omnipotent, as assumed here.

November 11, 2005 10:54 AM

I know some intelligent people who can't balance a checkbook, or make their own dinner... they aren't necessarily intelligent in every respect... maybe the intelligent designer is a klutz, or a slouch...

November 16, 2005 8:16 PM

Clever Creator,
don't let me wake in Kansas.
I'm dumb as I need to be.

November 17, 2005 1:37 PM

Clever Creator,
don't let me wake in Kansas.
Syllable...count...hard.

November 17, 2005 1:43 PM

There's no reason to assume the Designer was a single individual. My guess is that our planetary life is the output of a cross-department project team with a good vision statement and a messed-up implementation, most likely due to underfunding and an unrealistic delivery date.

So I'd guess that a Senior VP who loves bats is responsible for the 900+ species - no one wanted to be the one to say "that's enough!". Oxygen? The everyday law of unintended consequences doing it's usual thing; the Users said they could live with it. And the prostate-urethra thing? Simple. Two different development areas (Peeing and Procreating) choose the same access path; when they had to find a compromise by the due date, they just threw something together. However, they've promsied to fix it in the next release - if they get the funding.

Summing it all up: someone once said that a camel was a horse designed by a committee. From where I sit, that's a pretty good description of life as we know it.

November 17, 2005 2:49 PM