Chapter 15

Bad Design—the Human Throat

Here is a picture of the inside of the human throat. This is another example of really bad design. Our air passages and food passages meet and mix, sometimes with fatal results.

Figure 15.1 Human esophagus and trachea.

The pathway for air is marked with dots. The pathway for food and liquid is marked with lines. Note: these paths overlap in the mouth, and cross at the pharynx.

I have shown the parts where air gets inhaled with dots. I have shown the parts where food gets ingested with horizontal lines. The places where both food and air go are at the mouth, and farther down at the pharynx.

Most of the time, the air we inhale passes through the pharynx and gets funneled into the windpipe, or trachea. And most of the time, the food and water we ingest passes through the pharynx and gets funneled into the esophagus, and then down to the stomach. But not always. Sometimes, food or water wind up in the windpipe, as anyone who has ever inhaled cracker crumbs can tell you.

Sometimes, larger pieces of food get inhaled into the windpipe this way and get stuck there, where they block breathing. In these cases, if the Heimlich maneuver or some other means of removing the blockage isn’t performed very quickly, then the victim will die of asphyxiation. There are hundreds of cases like this each year. Many of these result in the sudden premature deaths of otherwise-healthy people.

This shows what happens when things go just a little bit wrong. Food winds up in the windpipe, where it blocks the flow of air. This is fatal unless remedied quickly.

Figure 15.2 Tracheal blockage due to inhalation of food.

This results in an inability to breathe.

A better-designed system would keep the tubes for air and food separate, to avoid unnecessary fatalities. If we were designed, why did the Designer do this job so badly?

Or is it that the Creator likes other animals better? There are creatures in which the air passages and food passages are entirely separate.

Figure 15.3 A whale spouting.

This is a picture of a whale spouting. The mist you see here is caused by the exhalation of air from the whale’s blowhole. The blowhole is really its nostrils. The whale’s respiratory system is completely separate from its digestive system. This means that a whale, unlike a human, can’t choke on its food by inhaling it.

If the Creator could do that for whales, I don’t know why he couldn’t do it for us.