Mr. Evolution

I was amused to read the other morning in the Seattle Times the headline, “Why don’t pregnant women topple over?” Couldn’t resist reading something we’ve all always been burning to know. It turns out that two engineering feats—differences between men and women anatomically—make it possible. One lower lumbar vertebra that in men is square-shaped is wedge-shaped in women. In addition, a key hip joint is 14% larger in women. As the article notes, without those differences women’s vertebrae would be subject to disabling shearing forces. One scientist gleefully observed “Evolution has tinkered…!”

I’m always amazed by how often evolutionary biologists anthropomorphize Blind Chance or Evolution, as if these concepts were living entities. “Tinkering” is something personalities do, not random forces. It implies design and intent. Most evolutionists do not believe in Intelligent Design, but it seems that in practice, it’s hard for even them to totally rid human development of a personal factor: dudes, if it looks like a duck, and walks like a duck…

Can we stop treating Mr. Evolution like it’s some kind of cosmic Boeing engineer? Wouldn’t it just be more logically consistent to say, “Some intelligent designer has tinkered…”? Or, “blind chance has lucked into women having these amazing design shifts. Gosh, what if the mutation had been disadvantageous?”

I guess then pregnant women would be falling all over themselves to have babies.