You know, I hear tech people saying stuff like this all the time but the question I would ask is: designed badly compared to what?
Compared to what it would look like if a human designed it. I took a course in math biology, and learned how a few of these subsystems work. A particular gene regulatory network I studied (can't recall the details, it was >5 years ago) looked like the following:
B, C = (False, False)
A = get_input()
if A:
B = True
if B:
C = True
if C:
do_something_interesting()
There were literally 2 pointless intermediary steps which evolution was pretty much incapable of removing. It was also unnecessary - in some different type of bacteria, the network fit the obvious pattern (I'd give a citation, but my math bio textbook is in a storage compartment halfway around the world from me):
A = get_input()
if A:
do_something_interesting()
You see nonsense like this all over biology.
The debate over intelligent design is clearly over. If you want to argue for creationism, you need to argue that god is a drooling retard who starts a project, forgets what he is doing, and uses the pieces to finish a completely different task.
Not saying there isn't waste in nature, but in your A,B,C example, at least there are three more things were nature could break something if necessary. It can not only change the input to A, it can also change if A: B = true to if A: B = false, likewise for if B: C = true.
Just saying, that kind of redundancy might be an advantage for evolution, smoothing it's path.
Compared to what it would look like if a human designed it. I took a course in math biology, and learned how a few of these subsystems work. A particular gene regulatory network I studied (can't recall the details, it was >5 years ago) looked like the following:
There were literally 2 pointless intermediary steps which evolution was pretty much incapable of removing. It was also unnecessary - in some different type of bacteria, the network fit the obvious pattern (I'd give a citation, but my math bio textbook is in a storage compartment halfway around the world from me): You see nonsense like this all over biology.The debate over intelligent design is clearly over. If you want to argue for creationism, you need to argue that god is a drooling retard who starts a project, forgets what he is doing, and uses the pieces to finish a completely different task.