Dissecting 'The Body'

Bill Bryson writes brilliant books, not the least being his latest – The Body: A Guide for Occupants.  He is informative, funny, human and humane.  You would be hard pressed not to marvel at what he marvels at, and to chortle at his quips.  Bryson has a way of putting things together, that reminds me of Malcom Gladwell’s joining dots not initially seeming to connect, giving fresh insights, Bryson with history, Gladwell with people.  

His language of miracle and marvel, design and purpose however keep betraying his mechanistic/emergent evolutionary commitments.  He uses the term miracle time after time to describe something he believes to be far from an actual miracle.  Miracle assumes something working on but coming from outside the system, and yet that is the only way to reasonably describe what is/has transpired in the formation of mankind. 

Clearly, he isn’t endorsing a creator, but his tacit and unwitting endorsement of God’s work makes it difficult to just leave it to purposeless and mindless forces.  Why marvel at what is, if what is, is only what is – nothing more.  That’s like being amazed at paint drying. 

Evolution is constantly appealed to in terms that belong to person and mind not purposelessness.  I’m always amazed at how quickly God is discarded only to be replaced with terms only fitting for God.  Our intelligence has made us foolish, and at least, inconsistent.  

Rightly Bryson is staggered by the complexity of the human body, and its galaxy of components that work in a congruity far beyond the imagination or reasoning of the mortal mind.  It appears the more we discover, and that is all we do, the less we really know.  And he clearly shows how knowing something never before realised can as easily lead to new methods of ineptitude in ineffective at best and disastrous at worse treatments because we don’t know nearly enough – like taking the pin out of grenade and arming a time bomb affording us a few moments to smile at our deftness and ingenuity in removing the pin before - BOOM. 

Bryson is inconsistent when he takes a dig at the Intelligent Design school of thought (p.299).  He cynically pokes fun at the idea of the birth canal being too tight for an intelligent designer thus proving, so he thinks, how unintelligent this designer must have been.  However, the very text the dismisses also explains that the pain he complains of was added to childbirth due to the rebellion of mankind in Eden.  It is easy to poke holes in half a story, which thing Bryson elsewhere argues others have done throughout history, to his chagrin. 

But then in the next paragraph he cites the compressibility a new-born baby’s skull has as an “assistance of nature,” enabling the possibility of birth.  Somehow nature has intelligently conspired to make a way.  Do away with creation and then speak of nature in terms of an intelligent, purposeful and remarkable system.  You can’t have it both ways Bill! 

But what a great read.  I thoroughly recommend Bryson.