The Banana

Today's topic is a little unusual. So much so, that I find it difficult to summarize in a single paragraph. Today’s topic will have to introduce itself.

OK. I know what you’re thinking. We’ve covered this issue in a previous post when talking about design. Well, yes. You’re right. But in this case the argument is so specific that I felt the need to address it on it’s own.

My first step in addressing this argument would have to be to agree with its claim. The banana does seem perfectly fitted for human consumption. It looks designed. I would even concede a further step. Not only does the banana look designed. It is designed. The question is: By whom?

The modern banana, sadly, did not occur naturally. In fact, neither did most of the things we eat. It was cultivated by man over thousands of years of selective breeding. And we’re still doing it. Every year new and exciting vegetables appear on the market ranging from baby carrots to yellow cherry tomatoes. The modern banana in fact looks almost nothing like a wild banana. Wild bananas are small, bitter and full of seeds. The modern banana was bred so well, that if left to its own devices, would go extinct almost instantly.

There is an argument to be made that the world looks designed. However, the more one studies the biological world (and few study this world more extensively than biologists and geneticists) the more it seems evolved, rather than designed. The human eye, another commonly used example, is not perfectly designed but demonstrably evolved. As are wild bananas.

The chair I am sitting on is well designed to fit my buttocks (though I bet a better fit could be devised). It does not only seem that way. It is that way. It was undoubtedly designed by someone in Sweden. A human being. It has that in common with cabbages, corn, cherry tomatoes, regular tomatoes, watermelons, wheat, chickens, cows, sheep, goats, and many many more.

And even if we allow ourselves to imagine a grand designer. A powerful being who put us all together. Hoping worriedly that his intentions for us are kinder than our intentions are toward bananas. We would have to pick our healthy curiosity up off the floor at take it one more step forward - to ask: Who designed the designer? And how did he design seedless watermelons to reproduce?