The Inner Monologue

Let’s be honest—if life were a senior design project, it would barely scrape by with a C-. Maybe a C+ if the professor was feeling generous. Because when you actually look at how living things are put together, the word “optimal” is the last one that comes to mind. “Haphazard”? “Barely functional”? “What were they thinking?”—those are far more accurate.

Take the human body, for example—the supposed “pinnacle of creation.” Oh, please. If this is intelligent design, then the designer was either a distracted intern or a committee that couldn’t agree on anything.

Exhibit A: The Eye (Or, How to Build a Camera Backwards)

Any engineer with half a brain would tell you that putting the wiring in front of the photoreceptors is a terrible idea. Yet here we are, with retinas assembled by someone who clearly never took Optics 101. The result? A blind spot where the nerves bundle together—because why not leave a glaring flaw in your flagship sensory organ?

Exhibit B: The Recurrent Laryngeal Nerve (A Scenic Detour Through the Neck)

In giraffes, this nerve takes a 12-foot detour because instead of rerouting it logically, evolution decided, “Nah, just loop it under the aortic arch like we did in fish. It’s fine.” And thus, an entire species ended up with a nerve that makes a pointless U-turn because changing the blueprint was too much effort.

Exhibit C: The Human Pelvis (Childbirth as a Design Flaw)

Humans decided that walking upright was cool, but nobody told the birth canal to keep up. So now, babies have to twist and contort their way out like they’re escaping a poorly designed escape room, often requiring outside intervention. Meanwhile, hyenas? They also have a rough time, but at least they didn’t pretend they were optimizing for anything.

Exhibit D: The Air/Food Highway (Why Not Just Combine Them?)

Ah yes, the throat—where breathing and swallowing share the same tube like roommates who hate each other. One wrong move, and suddenly you’re choking on a grape like some kind of biological joke. Any first-year mechanical engineer could devise a better system, but evolution shrugged and said, “Eh, most of them won’t die from it.”

The Truth: Life is Just “Good Enough”

And that’s the real kicker—nature doesn’t care about elegance. It doesn’t care about efficiency. It only cares about working long enough to make more copies. That’s it. No grand plan, no flawless engineering—just a relentless, sloppy game of trial and error where the winners are whoever stumbles into a solution that barely keeps them alive.

So the next time someone tells you life is perfectly designed, laugh. Because perfection doesn’t leave behind a fossil record full of dead ends, vestigial limbs, and creatures that accidentally poisoned themselves by evolving venom resistance after their prey did.

Life isn’t brilliant. It’s just competent. And honestly? That’s kind of beautiful in its own ridiculous way.