If intelligent design is real, why do men have nipples?

If intelligent design is real, why do men have nipples?

Because imagine what it would look like if it was smooth. Think of them as racing stripes on a Mustang. They are really cool, but there only for style.

 

I think nipples are just a case of evolutionary noise (things that don't provide any benefit/disadvantage to survival but are still "along for the ride" of natural selection). Not everything needs to be there for a reason.

 

Well as far as male nipples go, men can lactate if conditions are met.
I guess it's a fail safe for the child in case the mother dies and no one else is around.

 

McCartney, just so we're clear, although I disagree with Bubba quite a bit, he is absolutely right on this point. His interpretations of that passage in Genesis is the only correct one.

God has no phyiscal body. He only had one for a few years, as Jesus. But there are abundant versus, like John 4:24 and Isaiah 31:3 that spell out in explicit terms that God is not a corporeal being, but a spirit. Therefore, you are wrong, and Bubba is right.

 

It is also worth noting that in concentrating on Gen. 1. 26 you're forgetting the following verse.

Gen 1. 27 So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them. (KJV)

That kills any stupid literalist view right there since obviously despite the paternalistic reference of God as he it is quite clear man and woman are both created in God's image.

Any attempt to give god a corporeal body based on an incomplete reading of scripture or an out of context reference to the verse is clearly wrong.

 

I believe the created in "God's Image" means having a greater sense of free will. In the very least, Genesis delineates (I don't know what "delineate" means, but I'll use the word anyways) a difference between Mankind and the rest of the animal kingdom.

Since we are asking about why men have nipples, why do our armpits excessively sweat, and why are they smelly?

 

As to why men have nipples, I haven't got a bloody clue, but I think the appendix is an evolutionary hold over. I think it was sonething to do with early hominids have evoled as have two stomachs, as they evolved in semi-dessert conditions.I could be wrong about that though.

 

The problem I see is that the arguments for intelligent design requires one to prove a fairly subjectively detailed god which in turn leads to a very selective observation of the world.

Life comes from life, so at least the first life had to come from god.

However you then need to add a loophole that somehow says god did not come from anything.

Which in turn means that either god did not come from life, or not all life must come from life, contradicting the original argument.

Not to mention that is only based on observation, we do not have any sort of absolute proof of that (although there is a ton of evidence for it).

One can say that complexity, order and structure on the order of magnitude that is life needs to have a creator, but you get into the same circle as above.

And there are other things in nature that an intelligent designer contradicts. You can make the observation that life comes from life, but why does no one ever make the observation that life only creates the same kind of life (a man has never made a mouse from scratch [we can make two bread, but that is not the same thing], likewise a bee has never created a man)? Likewise, all life must consume things, and a theist must ignore observations like this, or create loopholes based on pure speculation and hope to somehow make the observable world less rational than their faith.

And when you start to throw the biblical God in instead of just a general god, you start to ignore other observations like no life has ever gotten anything perfect.

 

As to why men have nipples, I haven't got a bloody clue.

Because men can lactate. It's that simple.

 

I know! I saw it on a documentary.

At a stage of devolopment in the uterus, the child still has no detectable gender untill the hormones kick in, so it niples in the case it turns out to be female.

Evolution for you people!

 

That's true. The blueprint for the basic human form is female. It takes a testosterone kick in utero to transform the fetus into a male.

The male body is really a female body with a few factory extras. Hence males have nipples that don't develop into breasts at puberty.

Sometimes this doesn't happen as well as expected and we get gender unspecific babies. Those are usually raised as female because they look more like girls than boys, but they are XY chromosome males.

I don't get the whole intelligent design argument so I'll leave it at that.

 

Same reason women have a g-spot and a clitoris. In the male, those develop into the prostate and the penis in the womb, while the female has the vestigal remnants of these.

Nipples are similar. Females develop mammary glands and such, while men just have the external vestiges.

 

At a stage of devolopment in the uterus, the child still has no detectable gender untill the hormones kick in

I believe we're all female to start with. If male hormones are present then you develop into a boy, if not, then you continue to develop into a female.

To put that into context :- It is an intelligent design - ie you can make either a male, or a female from the same starting point. Reduces redundancy and complexity to create two sexes from a single start point.

 

Nipples of either sex are highly sensative to stimuli.

Perhaps they were designed for hightened sensations.

Just because the female nipples are use for the purpose of breast feeding doesn't mean thats what males nipples are for and certainly doesn't mean that we evolved.

Which leads to an interesting question.

If nipples are a byproduct of evolution, they obviously had to develope before the split of the different sexes so would inturn should have evolved for reasons other than lactation.

Seems to me evolution has a dilema.

 

Ditto for the appendix. I mean, that's why we call it hte appendix, right? What the heck is the use of having a big bag of poisen in our bodies?

I can answer this. Originally the appendix was for digesting Cellulose. Cellulose is a main component of most plant cell walls, it's also in wood and other things. Since, Cellulose is no longer in most people's diets anymore, (who goes out and eats grass) we no longer need the appendix to break down the polymomer. Other animals have appendixs that are still used including apes, wombats, most rodents and a few various others.

The appendix also has lymphoid tissue which helps produce antibodies, but considering so do alot of other body parts, the appendix isn't essaintial to have for that.

 

Are we still talking about "nipples" in here?

Firstly, I've never actually seen any legitimate challenge presented in here against Intelligent Design via the existence of male nipples.

If the argument is one from 'superfluity,' please explain? That needs to be reasonably established.

How is it a challenge to Intelligent Design?

How are we gaging this?

Is beauty 'superfluous,' in our opinions, ergo, an inherent argument against design?

Is love superfluous?
Music?
Literature?
How about intellectual thought beyond mere instinct for preservation? To what extent? I mean, from the basis of the rationale being attributed to male nipples for being an argument against ID/Deity, then, really, virtually anything deemed an 'excess' is to be construed an argument against Deity...and a main failing here is that it has yet to be established that Deity would always act in an economy that is rational to usward, or that Deity cannot act in extravagance, or what we perceive to be extravagance or generosity.

If the argument is strictly from 'necessity,' which seems the underlying presumption intrinsically attached to "male nipples" as a challenge to ID, I think the challenger need go into explaining how superfluity or excess are inherently an argument against a designer?

If he can't establish that, then, he has no argumentation to begin with, logically.



I've barely touched on this compared to where reason takes us, but it seems to me any attempt to present "male nipples" as a challenge to ID is premature at best, and at worst just nonsensical for the reasons briefly touched upon. There is yet to be established the necessary philosophical foundation upon which such "male nipple" argumentation must be set before it can even be considered any sort of challenge.


This whole "nipple" business is presumptuous, silly, unfounded philosophically and logically at this juncture.


The fact is, if we turn it around, extraneous or extravagant features may be more properly an indication of ID than any sort of challenge to ID.

Somehow the thinking seems to be that common descent leaves a trail of the superfluous, when in fact, the basis of common descent is utilitarian adaptibility to environmental efficiency, albeit through chance, such that the best suited organism might be the most efficiently shorn of physilogical superfluity for best survival advantage.

(From this perspective there is little reason for more than a paramecium to exist, with anything beyond such life a tentative argument posited against ID.)


From this perspective extraneous physilogical or anatomical baggage can be construed either way for both ID or common descent.

 

Are we still talking about "nipples" in here?

Well....... it is a major part in the theme of the thread.

 

Male nipples are to female nipples what the penis is to the clitoris. They both start growing before the human body is assigned a sex during development.

Point being, give a man enough estrogen, and those things will lactate something like human milk, just like the clitoris will grow up to 4 inches with enough testosterone treatment. Male nipples are not a mistake disproving intelligent design, they are a sign of efficient design. Humans are not male or female, they are a hormonal balance of the two. Males just don't have the hormones to uses their mammaries.

 

Sex is determined at the very moment of conseption.

It is the chromosome package, (XX or XY, can't remember which) that the sperm delivers which determines the sex and which hormones are inturn produced to create the differences between male and females.

 

Correction: "physiological."
In my post I typo'd the above word repeatedly.

 

Sex is determined at the very moment of conseption.

Correct but the body doesn't develop any differently until later. Only through genetic testing can you determine the sex of a fetus under 4 months (I think). Therefore males have nipples because the fetus develops as both male and female. It is simpler to work from a basic model than two create a being that develops differently from the start.

I would think that this proves intelligent design if anything. And I'm not even a believer!

Edit: Also of note, I recall reading somewhere that the male prostate and the female G-spot came from the same fetal cells, just like the clitoris and the penis or the labia and the scrotum.

 

Not to forget my last post (which I thought had many good points), the problem with ID is several fold.

One is that there is no clear ID theory. Do you mean that some general god set things into motion billions of years ago? Do you mean YEC? Do you mean something else entirely?

If the first, then I know of extremely few people who would seriously argue. Most people, although maybe they don't believe it, know it cannot be argued. They may ask why must there be a god in that case, but they know that they cannot disprove that case. Also in that case, naturalism would still be mostly accurate.

If you mean YEC, then the problem is that (IMO) there is very little direct evidence for it. I have read web sites and books and numerous times they have clear and blatant fallacies and I would say that sometimes they outright mislead people (for example, one I read stated that nearly all of the world has been under water, but they never stated that all evidence says at different times, but they implied that it was all at the same time. And don't even get me started on the second law of thermodynamics). A few are good, and should be debates, but for the most part, they do nothing but bash evolution and modern scientists with little that actually support their own beliefs.

The other problem with YEC is that the strongest evidence for it, the largest reason people believe in it is because of a proof of something else. The belief in YEC is secondary to a proof for something else, and that is ones personal proof of God. As such, all physical evidence, all logic, everything else does not matter, and it makes it very hard for this debate to go anywhere.

If you mean some other type of ID, please give details. We cannot debate the merits of ID simply by saying 'I believe in ID.' This gets into a huge difference between naturalism and creationism. Simply saying 'god did it' is not an explanation compared to the detail in scientific theories. If science said nothing more than 'it was natural' then they would be equal. If ID gave details as to 'god did this X years ago which did this, and then god did...' then they would be equal. But there has never been any ID'er that I know of who has ever given enough detail in their belief of ID to even merit them as equal. Without that, there is no real way that they can be debated.

So please, when you say intelligent design, explain in detail what you exactly mean.

 

>>>> I recall reading somewhere that the male prostate and the female G-spot came from the same fetal cells <<<<

Well, that's just it isn't it?

Does it mean because a woman does not really have an orgasm unless the G-spot is stimulated that I cannot have an orgasm unless the prostate is stimulated?

Is this part of the flaws in the design that we are talking about?

I have seen blokes at the Gym with man boobs and huge nipples and it is not a good sight, let me tell you.

Evolution or creation, what ever. It has gone wrong somewhere.

Not a good sight at all.

 

Or we're just looking at the picture upside down.

Perhaps men have nipples so they won't spend too much time staring at a women's *ahem* before getting to business, if you catch my drift.

 

Simple. So women can suck on them.