Attention all you Darwinists still battling the tenacious Creationists (and losing miserably)! With all of your arguments about DNA and phylogenetic drift and fossils and invocations of common sense, you are overlooking the single critical fact, an anatomic body-part that cinches the deal. The cloaca.
Surely this week’s gross-out photo of the moment–deemed the man without an ass crack–suggests the richness of the cloacal argument. He’s a guy whose left and right medial gluteus maximus have been drawn together in an attempt to manage his pilonidal cyst, an embryonic vestige that may cause trouble by becoming irritated and/or infected. It’s the very anatomic defect that kept Rush Limbaugh from serving in the Army.
This sort of anatomic rearrangement in an attempt to find good clean tissue edges is a common surgical trick; often large things must be removed from the human body and surgeons then are obligated to fill the fresh divots and craters with any manner of tissue they can find. The easiest is to draw together whatever is there–ergo the uncracked man (who assures us his defecation apparatus is just fine, thank you). Otherwise they have to go elsewhere for tissue flaps and movement of large chunks of dissected flesh from here to there.
His, or the photo’s, wild popularity demonstrates that the body part referred to by patients and doctors alike as “down there” is simply too overwhelming for rational discussion. No ponderous adult consideration is possible–rather, adolescent snickering prevails. So what better place then to build the final winning argument for evolution? It is perfect common sense: Fight the very irrational with the even more irrational.
Here’s the angle: If He is present and guiding things from a Divine Blueprint, why on earth did God place waste removal (defecation and urination) so close to reproduction and sexual pleasure? And why are all of these activities so very close to the end of most precious anatomic real estate of all, the spinal cord? I mean, we are supposed to be well-designed–as the Poet said, “What a piece of work is a man.”
Enter the cloaca. Birds and reptiles and amphibians each have this final collecting system, called the cloaca after the Latin for “sewer,” for waste (urine and feces) and for reproduction. (OK, it’s a little more complex than that–most birds use the cloaca for all three activities but a few avian males have a penis). And some reptiles add a fourth function to the overworked cloacal repository–that of respiration as well. A wondrous receptacle indeed.
But–mirabile dictu–in placental mammals (that’s us!) the entire mess has been redesigned and re-engineered into new corporate parts for sleekness and efficiency–and fulfillment of lust. Though urine and semen do in fact flow along the same exit path, the rest of the various animal activities have been separated. Waste management has been rendered unto waste management while reproduction, including coitus and parturition, has its own set of canals.
The grand intelligent design blueprint surely would not and could not condone such a partition. After all, the split is completely and solely for pleasure’s sake. The pleasure argument previously has been tried by evolutionists hoping to find leverage from the apparent misalignment between carnal pleasure and Puritan prudery both being condoned by the Big Guy. The Creationist response to this salvo, though, made some sense: that the Deity made sex pleasurable to assure the masses stay maximally pregnant in order to keep the species going.
But the cloaca is the winner: what earthly, or other-worldly, reason could there be for this mammalian separation of waste and reproduction except to assure pleasure that’s a tad more hygienic? After all, babies do fine coming through a birth canal–anyone who has seen a birth knows that hygiene is not really of the highest order until junior is washed. No, the hygiene afforded by separating these two basic bodily functions promotes little more than the post-coital cigarette or its more modern equivalent, the after-glow iPhone check.
So Evolutionists, I implore you to grab the moment created by the Man Without an Ass Crack, and move the discussion from the doomed redoubt of the logical and scientific. Rather, the time has come to embrace the adolescent and the disgusting, the thoroughly panic-stricken, the frightening world of down there.
