Ray Kroc, one of the founders of McDonald’s, was giving a speech to a large group when he asked what initially appeared to be a strange question. “What is the business of McDonald’s?” Members of the audience nervously laughed, and initially no one answered. Ray again prompted the audience, and one voice finally gave the expected answer, “Hamburgers.” “Hamburgers?” the speaker asked. ” Is there anyone here who could not cook a better hamburger than McDonald’s?” Silence. “Hamburgers are not our business. Our business is real estate.” McDonald’s owns or controls the buildings and land for its restaurants, then leases the operation to franchise owners. McDonald’s is one of the largest real estate companies in the world.
I took a real estate course, not intending to be an agent, but to learn for investment purposes. Location is the key. Put a store or restaurant in a prime location, and there is a good chance for success. Locate it a block away in an unfavorable spot, and success will be much harder to achieve. Our anatomy is totally constructed on prime locations. What I am about to propose may on the surface appear a bit obtuse, largely because we are so accustomed to viewing our bodies from an unquestioning standpoint. Step outside the box, and consider the quote by Albert von Szent-Gyorgyi ,”Discovery is seeing what everyone else saw and thinking what no one thought.”
I decided to choose teeth, probably because I brushed them this morning, but really almost any part of our anatomy will suffice. We have teeth on our upper jaw and lower mandible, nicely arranged, clearly for slicing and chewing. They are for the most part neatly arranged on both sides, and no where else. We do not have teeth popping up routinely in our extremities, off our bones, no where else. They are fortunately positioned just inside our mouth, just in front of our tongue, just in front of our pharynx and above the esophagus, and happen to have salivary glands nearby to moisten food. Muscles are in the right location for chewing. Pretty standard observations. They are perfectly located. Why?
If mutations are random, the results should fall into 3 categories: beneficial, deleterious, or neutral. Beneficial mutations are extremely rare (see chapter35 “What can go Wrong” in God’s Human Biology). Dr. Richard Lenski has been conducting long term lineage studies of the bacteria E coli since 1988. Deleterious mutations far exceed any that can be considered helpful over that time span and even those “beneficial” genetic changes actually arose from the loss of regulatory control of genetic expression. If a mutation is neutral, then should we not see these anatomic ‘warts” all over the place. Everything is perfectly located. Our stomach is below the esophagus, and above the duodenum. Our gallbladder is in the perfect place to dump bile into the small intestine. I can go on and on.
Some will claim that the appendix is evidence of a useless vestigial organ or that the eye’s arrangement of light sensitive cones and rods are inappropriately located at the back of the retina. These and similar objections are played like biological trump cards to disprove a Creator, for why would such anatomic mistakes be present if a first rate engineer had been at the design controls. After all, the evolutionary guru, Richard Dawkins had famously decreed, “Biology is the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose” but goes on to purport this is illusory and occurs because “there is, at bottom, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but blind pitiless indifference.” Many atheists have rallied around this flagpole. Such statements are great for marketing, but don’t make for good logic. If something appears to have been designed , then until proven otherwise, design should be the favored source. Dawkins’ source is his own opinion.
BTW, evidence now suggests the appendix serves as a storehouse for bacteria that may survive severe inflammation and diarrhea to repopulate our natural gut microbiota. Also computer modeling indicates the arrangement of the retinal cells is optimum for preventing light scattering which would blur visual images instead of allowing the sharply defined constructs we see. Not bad designing, and an A+ for location.