Intelligent Design

[hongkongfooey]

I can't believle this thread is still going on. I thought the Mods would have shut it down by now. By all means continue.

 

[elder999]

There's also the two funny questions that have yet to be answered. . .

Why do humans get goosebumps?? Why do upland geese have webbed feet??

Laterz.

We can only assume that the upland goose once had more occasion to swim…as for goose bumps,

Goose bumps are created when tiny muscles at the base of each hair, contract and pull the hair erect. The reflex is started by the sympathetic nervous system, which is in general responsible for many fight-or-flight responses.

Goose bumps are often a response to cold: in animals covered with fur or hair, the erect hairs trap air to create a layer of insulation. Goose bumps can also be a response to anger or fear: the erect hairs make the animal appear larger, in order to intimidate enemies. This can be observed in the intimidation displays of chimpanzees, and in frightened cats. In humans, it can even extend to piloerection as a reaction to hearing nails scratch on a chalkboard, listening to music, or watching a scary movie/

Piloerection as a response to cold or fear is vestigial in humans; as humans retain only very little body hair, the reflex now serves no known purpose.

What heretic888 is implying, of course, is that this reflex is from a time when mass was less evolved, and covered with hair rather than clothing.

Interestingly, a friend and colleague is a prominent geneticist-she did some DNA testing on my family, as our ethnic history is pretty interesting for someone in her field. Anyway, the other day I mentioned to her that I was lactose intolerant, to which she replied, “Well, of course you are: 90% of African Americans and the same percentage of Native-Americans are.” She then proceeded to tell me why.

She explained that milk contains lactose, and that the enzyme which we need to digest it, lactase, becomes deficient in adults, but is present in almost all human infants, and that infants need lactose to digest the essential calcium that is present in milk. Adults can get calcium from plant foods, like leafy green vegetables, which, of course, infants can’t eat. Another important factor for digesting calcium is vitamin D, which can be obtained from oceanic fish, fish-eating mammals like seals, and synthesized in the body by exposing the skin to sunlight. Infants, unlike adults, can get their vitamin D only from sunlight, because vitamin D does not naturally occur in milk. So, lactase deficiency, or diminishing in adulthood makes sense, engineering wise-it makes a small case for “intelligent design,” but what about all those people who are not lactose intolerant?

Dairying first began in the Middle East, 12,000 years ago-people there discovered that they couldn’t drink this abundant food, though-it made them sick. The could digest it if they let it sour, turn to yogurt or cheese, since fermentation changes undigestable lactose into sucrose, so there was no need for lactase production to use animal milk. Moreover, since these people had abundant vitamin D from sunlight, and calcium from leafy green vegetables, they didn’t need lactase. So, Jews, Arabs, Greeks, Sudanese, Africans and South Asians often have lactose intolerance, because they have no need of lactase.

Europeans, though, don’t suffer from lactose intolerance in such high percentages. They lived in a mist shrouded environment, had to bundle up against the cold, were without access to vitamin D in fish and sea mammals, and lacked green leafy vegetables in abundance. Under these conditions, individuals who were genetically capable of digesting large quantities of unfermented milk were better able to reach adulthood, avoid disease, and have reproductive success. Karen (that’s my friend) estimates that within 4 or 5 thousand years, the gene that controls lactase production in adulthood spread to over 90 percent of the individuals in northern European dairying populations.

Interestingly, in India, Mongolia and China, we have some interesting stuff-India has a very long tradition of dairying, but primarily consumes milk in fermented form-not being stressed for calcium from plants or vitamin D from the sun, China has virtually no dairying, while the Mongolians do, but use fermented milk, and over 90 percent of Chinese and East Asians are lactose intolerant as adults.

To sum up, we have people exposed to sun who access to vegetables being typically lactose intolerant, and those who lacked sunshine and green leafy vegetables developing, over time, the ability to produce lactase and digest raw milk well into adulthood.

So, my question, for the “intelligent design/creationism/Adam and Eve, all of creation in perfect form as it is today” crowd, is, were Adam and Eve lactose intolerant, or not?