Unintelligent design

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The mammoth died out due to the creator's unintelligent plan, according to the UD

Unintelligent Design (short: UD) describes a religious parody that goes back to a book of the same name by Mark Perakh . The theses presented therein are intended as a satirical reaction to the intelligent design (ID for short) or creationism movement, which is supported by many fundamental religious circles .

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According to Perakh, life began with a creation . In contrast to intelligent design, however, there was no perfect plan of life, only one poorly thought out. The extinction of species and the emergence of non-viable species are therefore attributed to the errors in design. Unintelligent design therefore offers a (satirical) explanation for some of the weaknesses of intelligent design.

The elephants are given as an example : Fossils of 25 different species have been found, but only three of them have survived to this day. The Creator, who insisted on having “big mammals with big ears and long noses” in the world, worked flawed so that most of them became extinct.

Unintelligent Design aims to highlight the weak points of intelligent design by using the same methods. For example, the UD standpoints are aggressively presented on the Internet by “supporters” of the UD and with a touch of science, as is often seen with supporters of the ID.

In addition, the UD movement caricatures creationism or ID and its followers to point out that according to the current state of research and the overwhelming majority of scientific opinion, only theories of evolution through mutation and selection explain the development and wealth of species satisfactorily. At the same time, ironic reference is made to the attempts of the creationists , in particular to influence the theory of evolution , but also to influence the natural sciences and to exchange them for their religious- fundamentalist point of view.

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In the non-fiction book The Creation Lie: Why Darwin Is Right by the British evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins , a chapter is devoted to unintelligent design . Using a few examples, the question is asked why an intelligent designer created certain living beings with obvious defects, or why certain parts of the body had nonsensical sizes or shapes. Dawkins lists among other things: Rudiments - a second and nonsensical pair of wings in flies ; Goosebumps in humans (an atavism that stems from once the fur was raised); Vertebrate eye ; the human vas deferens , which takes an inexplicable detour through the human body; the receding larynx nerve - this takes a long detour through the body (in giraffes up to 5 meters). Dawkins also mentions the fact that the koala bear's pouch is open at the bottom, even though it lives on trees. This is explained by the descent from an animal that is similar to today's wombat and that lived in caves and underground passages. As a wombat, it moved horizontally, and an open-topped bag would have thrown dirt at the baby while digging a tunnel. Another example is the impractical upward opening of the maxillary sinuses in humans, which can be explained by the fact that our ancestors were four-legged and therefore pointed forward.

literature

  • Mark Perakh: Unintelligent Design. Amherst: Prometheus Books, 2003, ISBN 1-591020-84-0
  • Richard Dawkins: The Creation Lie: Why Darwin Is Right. Translated from the English by Sebastian Vogel, Ullstein Verlag 2010, ISBN 9783550087653

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