Tuesday, March 14, 2006

Interesting....

Here's one the ID advocates are going to hate, but I find the argument intriguing. Apparently, from an evolutionary perspective, pregnancy isn't always the best thing in the world. More to the point, with all the potential health problems associated with pregnancy (for both the fetus and the mother) one has to question the credibility of a Designer, particularly when the views of intelligent design activists tend to coincide with anti-choice advocates who insist fetal tissue is divinely inspired. Certainly one has to question why pregnancy bears all the hallmarks of an "evolutionary tug-of-war" between mother and fetus and not perfect harmony as might be expected from a Designer.

A paragraph from the article:

In a 1993 paper, Dr. Haig first predicted that many complications of pregnancy would turn out to be produced by this conflict. One of the most common complications is pre-eclampsia, in which women experience dangerously high blood pressure late in pregnancy. For decades scientists have puzzled over pre-eclampsia, which occurs in about 6 percent of pregnancies.

Dr. Haig proposed that pre-eclampsia was just an extreme form of a strategy used by all fetuses. The fetuses somehow raised the blood pressure of their mothers so as to drive more blood into the relatively low-pressure placenta. Dr. Haig suggested that pre-eclampsia would be associated with some substance that fetuses injected into their mothers' bloodstreams. Pre-eclampsia happened when fetuses injected too much of the stuff, perhaps if they were having trouble getting enough nourishment.

Note the word "predicted"; prediction is something you can do with evolutionary theory. You can't do it with Intelligent Design.

And speaking of predictable:

Dr. Haig has enjoyed watching his theory mature and inspire other scientists. But he has also had to cope with a fair amount of hate mail. It comes from across the political spectrum, from abortion opponents to feminists who accuse him of trying to force patriarchy into biology.

"People seem to think, 'He must have a political agenda,' " Dr. Haig said. "But I'm not talking at all about conscious behaviors. I'm just interested in these mechanisms and why they evolved."

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