Brains without design?

It appears the next battleground for creationism is the brain. The premise of creationists seems to be that the brain has some properties which can not have arisen naturally. A Designer is required.

What kind of designer? Jason Rosenhouse has some thoughts:

Is the evidence for design in biological systems so obvious? I hold that the brain, the ultimate test case, is, in many respects, a true design nightmare. Let's review a bit. When we compare the human brain to that of other vertebrates, it becomes clear that the human brain has mostly developed through agglomeration. The difference between the lizard brain and the mouse brain does not involve wholesale redesign. Rather, the mouse brain is basically the lizard brain with some extra stuff on top. Likewise, the human brian is basically the mouse brain with still more stuff piled on top. That's how we wind up with two visual systems and two auditory systems (one ancient and one modern) jammed into our heads. The brain is built like an ice cream cone with new scoops piled on at each stage of our lineage.

Accidental design is even more obvious at the cellular level in the brain. The job of neurons is to integrate and propagate electrical signals. Yet, in almost all respects, neurons do a bad job. They propagate their signals slowly (a million times more slowly than copper wires), their signaling range is tiny (0 to 1,200 spikes/second), they leak signals to their neighbors, and, on average, they successfully propagate their signals to their targets only about 30 percent of the time. As electrical devices, the neurons of the brain are extremely inefficient.

One approach Creationists and ID/IOTs will take is to try to figure out reasons why It's Better This Way. Somehow, slow and leaky propagation is better than fast and well-insulated propagation. Somehow, a 1200 baud bandwidth is better than a megabaud or gigabaud bandwidth. (If nature can come up with crystalline lenses, couldn't she have come up with fiber optics?)

So, at either the systems or cellular level, the human brain, which the intelligent design crowd would imagine to be the most highly designed bit of tissue on the planet, is essentially a Rube Goldberg contraption. Not surprisingly, some proponents of intelligent design have left themselves a way to retreat on this point. Michael Behe writes, “Features that strike us as odd in a design might have been placed there by the designer for a reason -- for artistic reasons, for variety, to show off, for some as-yet-undetectable practical purpose or for some unguessable reason -- or they might not.” Or, stated another way, if on first glimpse biological systems look cool, that must be the result of intelligent design. If, on closer inspection, biological systems look like a cobbled-together contraption, that's still got to be from intelligent design, just intelligent design with an offbeat sense of humor. Clearly, this position is not a true, falsifiable scientific hypothesis, as is the theory of evolution. The idea of intelligent design is merely and assertion. (pp 241-242).

Here, Behe as much as admits that Intelligent Design is not science. A scientific theory, or even conjecture, is falsifiable. That is, there is some conceivable observation which someone can make that will show that theory or conjecture to be false. Behe admits that, no matter what anyone observes, intelligent design can never be proven false – at least not to him.