Peregrine Falcons and Atheism
 |
| (Picture found here) |
All animals require air, but as anyone who has survived a
hurricane can tell you, air at high speed kills. The peregrine weighs between
one and three pounds. It dives at two hundred miles an hour — faster than a
hurricane. That’s the speed of an F-3 tornado. How can the peregrine breathe?
Air pressure should burst its lungs. The peregrine’s nose is equipped with
tubercles: baffles that ‘create a whirled, conch-like passage of air into the
anterior nasal cavity . . . to aid proper respiration at high speeds.’ This
design was adopted by engineers of jet aircraft. The kind of guys working over
at Northrop Grumman. Inlet cones, similar to peregrine nostril baffles, enable
jets to fly without choking the engine.
No one tries to convince you that inlet cones just appeared
on jets one day purely by chance. Who lavished such TLC on the peregrine’s nostril?
Please don’t tell me ‘evolution did it’ unless you can provide me with
evolution’s name, address, and phone number so I can ask follow-up questions:
What are your motivations? Intentions? Modus operandi? Hourly rates? How did
you juggle all these elements in space and time — the proto-peregrine’s speed,
its lungs, its nose, its dives, its survival until it could reproduce in enough
numbers to keep the successful traits — without being obliterated by its failed
traits? How did you suspend each element on some shelf somewhere until you
managed, purely by chance, to orchestrate them all into harmony? Until I get
answers to these questions, ‘evolution did it’ makes as much sense to me as ‘Santa
Claus brought all these presents.’”
~Danusha Goska
Comments