Sometimes I’m so amazed with the human body that I really start to think that there had to be some level of intelligent design in us. But Jim Holt makes some great, amusing points against the rise of “intelligent design” theory in today’s Sunday Magazine New York Times:

In mammals, for instance, the recurrent laryngeal nerve does not go directly from the cranium to the larynx, the way any competent engineer would have arranged it. Instead, it extends down the neck to the chest, loops around a lung ligament and then runs back up the neck to the larynx. In a giraffe, that means a 20-foot length of nerve where 1 foot would have done. If this is evidence of design, it would seem to be of the unintelligent variety.

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