Atheism vs. God's Existence

[Angrboda]

Their point is that the same nerve that is found in humans is found in giraffes (and all other mammals) because we all inherited the pattern from a common ancestor. That ancestor didn't have necks like we do (part of why the best book to read about it is called Your Inner Fish), so the routing of the nerve didn't matter. However, as the same pattern was changed over time to evolve into the various mammal species, it couldn't simply "jump" to the other side of the bone it ran around; instead, it simply got longer and longer, in order to go up the neck and back down. In the extreme example, the giraffe, it makes a VERY long journey.

This is one of the thousands of ways you can see that we are all from common ancestry. [Edit to Add: And why we are skeptical of claims of design. A designer wouldn't do something as silly as running the nerve way up and back down, when a direct path would do, from the outset.]

As to your point about the Creator making a pre-formed pattern, which He knew life would follow in its evolution... um, okay. How is that different from just studying evolution as it is? It's certainly not the claims of Intelligent Design, which are essentially that life was deliberately shaped (by some unknown mechanism) by an outside crafter, in order that life as we know it might be here. It's the exact opposite claim. We can see that you recognize the insanity of that claim, by backing off from some of the Creationist elements of the ID movement, but frankly, your roots are showing, still.

Well like I said, I know that in humans it branches many times which is essential to its function. I tried google scholar looking for a paper on the extralaryngeal divisions of the giraffe, but I had no luck. If you know where I can find decent information, let me know.

Anyways, to make my point, here is a picture I found showing the divisions of the laryngeal nerve in humans.


Notice all the divisions as it moves back up. These divisions are necessary for breathing and circulation. I bet that this occurs in the giraffe too. If it didn't go down and go under the aortic arch and come back up, then how would it branch off to all these targets?