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Multiple problems with that argument. First, your alleged flaws in the human body have already been debunked by NC Tigah. Second, you're assuming that all of those features were detrimental in hunter-gatherer societies. Our bodies are built (whether you want to credit God or evolution or both) for a very different world from the one we have today, and the environment has changed too rapidly for us to evolve. So characteristics that may have been beneficial in the past are now detrimental.

NC didnt debunk anything, he threw out a red herring that disproved nothing of what I have said. I have never said the appendix holds no function at all.

Second, I know our bodies are designed for a different time in a different world, THATS THE WHOLE POINT. We wouldnt have structures like those if that wasnt the case. Only evolution makes such things being present in humans possible, unless one subscribes to a rather poor creator God. Under no circumstance is a recurrent laryngeal nerve, for instance, beneficial to mammals. It isnt particular deletarious but represents a woefully inefficient method of getting nerve signals to our larynx to produce sound. It is a vestige of a time when we evolved from lower order animals who also have it and it did matter that they had it for complicated physiological reasons not worth getting into. It is no coincidence that all mammals have one despite it being inefficient.

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As far as the most recent common ancestor, it could be a lot more recent than you assert. I've seen population experts conclude that one could have lived as recently as AD 55. 20% of Irish males have Niall's Y chromosome. So it's definitely not "beyond a shadow of a doubt" that the MRCA lived more than a few thousand years ago.

And one in seven people are believed to be descended from Ghengis Khan. You're talking about a completely different thing. Most recent common ancestor is NOT the same as all humanity arising from two people. A most recent common ancestor in 55 AD is certainly possible (though very unlikely) but all our genetic diversity makes it impossible to have arisen from two people. If we had, we'd have DNA like that of Cheetahs were essentially all Cheetahs now are now virtually identical to each other. Cheetahs had a genetic bottleneck tens of thousands of years ago that educed their population to just a few individuals (still more than 2) and they have zero genetic diversity because of it.

This post was edited on 2/22/14 at 3:38 pm