June 6, 2006

SELECTION BY DESIGN:

Thinning out the herd: The majority of Toronto cyclists don't wear helmets. It's not
a bright move (KENNETH KIDD, Jun. 4, 2006, Toronto Star)

Now, Marieke Gardner doesn't mention Charles Darwin specifically, not even in passing.

But you don't need to linger long with Gardner's recent study of Toronto cyclists to hear the great evolutionary scientist whispering between the lines and going on about "natural selection" taking its toll.

A second-year medical student at the University of Toronto, Gardner had set out on what seemed a simple task.

Studies have long shown that wearing a helmet while cycling dramatically reduces head injuries — by as much as 85 per cent. Riders not wearing helmets account for 90 per cent of all fatalities in bicycle accidents.

Or, looked at more broadly, one-third of all emergency room visits by cyclists are due to head injuries, as are two-thirds of cycling-related deaths.


If it were Darwinism rather than design wouldn't they have evolved thicker skulls?

Posted by Orrin Judd at June 6, 2006 12:00 AM
Comments

Unloop.

Posted by: oj at June 6, 2006 7:25 AM

Clearly not, as it's the ones who haven't that are being culled.

Posted by: Annoying Old Guy at June 6, 2006 8:50 AM

I think thick-skulled enters the equation first.

Posted by: Bartman at June 6, 2006 9:25 AM

If not for motorcyclists, we'd be eyeing the prisons for organ donors...

Posted by: Mike Earl at June 6, 2006 11:22 AM

Of course, a lot depends on the context of that bike ride. If you are playing in traffic, then it makes sense to wear a helmet. (It also would make sense to not be there in the first place, or at least wear something more protective than over-stretched lycra...) But if you are puttering around on a residential street, insisting on one is taking nannystate-ism to the extreme.


Posted by: Raoul Ortega at June 6, 2006 11:44 AM

Evolution always involves tradeoffs. A thicker skull requires more nutritional resources, would add more weight to the neck and overall, making us slower, etc. It's probably better for humans to develop abilities that help avoid blows to the head, which may be exactly what happened: Neanderthals had thicker skulls, and look what happened to them.

Generally, organisms don't put biological resources into things that aren't critically important. One example is vitamin C: crucial for many living things, so most of them make it in their bodies and don't need to get it in their diet. Humans are a rare exception, which indicates we evolved in areas where we had so much vitamin C in our diets that there was an advantage in losing the ability to synthesize it.

Posted by: PapayaSF at June 6, 2006 5:11 PM

Just So....

Posted by: oj at June 6, 2006 5:34 PM

So what's the ID argument as to why humans don't have thicker skulls and can't synthesize vitamin C? "God made it so"?

Posted by: PapayaSF at June 6, 2006 6:27 PM

PapayaSF, thicker skulls are not irreducably complex, and are not part of the ID critique of Darwinism. As to your arguement in paragraph two, that's a shell game. When the Darwinists come across something that is not critically important, they just proclaim that it's used to aid in breeding or some other unmeasurable process.

Posted by: Robert Mitchell Jr. at June 6, 2006 6:56 PM

We designed helmets, no?

Posted by: oj at June 6, 2006 6:57 PM
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