Understanding Design in Automobiles and Organisms...so you can dump Evolution in the trash bin - part one
If you understood the mechanics of evolution you would not for one second believe it! Not if you have a lick of common sense. The entire idea is absolutely ridiculous. I was thinking that perhaps if I compared the idea of evolution to the idea of automobile manufacturing, perhaps I could open some closed minds? It will take three posts to be thorough and systematic about this subject. Unlike most posts I will not cut and paste from other blogs.
RELIGION BEFORE EVIDENCE IS THE RULING PARADIGM
In order to make parts more efficiently, we had groups that worked on Kaizen (continual improvement) concepts to come up with more efficient ways to make what we produced. As part of one such group, we would be rewarded with bonuses for ideas that saved the company money or time or found uses for things usually thrown away. We also worked on ways to make things safer in the plant, for there were so many substances that were toxic or were heated to dangerous temperatures used in our factory and so many machines that could chop off a hand or swallow an arm or even flat kill you if you were careless, so finding ways to avoid accidents was also a priority. Fires had burned a couple of employees to the point that they were given full disability pay, so looking for ways to avoid or more quickly put out fires was always a topic of conversation.
THE FACTORY VERSION OF MUTATIONS - ACCIDENTS
One of my friends had a hand cut off, one had an arm compressed up to his shoulder between big steel rollers and had unreal agony as well as eventually losing the arm. A woman I knew slightly was burned in a big fire and got disability. Several back injuries and bad falls caused a few employees to take disability and leave. We convinced the company to take some important safety measures so that any openings to cutting or compressing machinery that could be screened off would be. We got more fire hoses put in. Thank God no one died in an accident while I was there, although at least one employee did die on another shift. One of my friends was blinded completely in one eye and all but blinded in other by calcium oxide, a substance used by the lines that made the asphalt and rubber-based products. It was helpful in breaking down scrap that was mixed and put in with the new batches of black stuff we called "making dirt into money" and sometimes I would toss a bag into the big final mixer when I needed to change the stiffness of the mix quickly. He was trying to blow out the calcium oxide feed line and it blew back at him, knocking off his safety glasses and filling his eyes. From that time forward people had to wear helmets in order to do that, but it was too late for my friend.
So one part that would go under the rug on the floorboards of GM C-Body cars required the Padding line, one of the Mastic lines, the Hot Mold department and of course forklifts and the warehouse and many workers and many raw materials and many different production lines and presses. It needed to be heated and cooled and, by the way, each department also had quality assurance measures in place, with quality assurance people checking on parts on a schedule to monitor the processes. Each department required relief men to take the place of the workers so the workers could get their breaks and their lunch time. Each department had a foreman and there would also be department supervisors. So C-Body floor parts required the efforts of several departments in the factory, with each department using at least 12 people for that particular part and others who would move the parts and ship them out after manufacture. This C-Body part was just one of thousands of parts that would go into making a C-Body automobile, made from components produced by dozens of factories and involving semi-trucks and rail lines and all eventually being sent to the main GM plant involved where hundreds of people would be involved in assembly and quality control and all the other aspects of a factory would now be focused on actually making an automobile. But think of the dozens of factories making components for the automobile. One could say that many thousands of workers and supervisors and engineers and mechanics and quality control people and drivers and so on were all needed to make one C-Body car.
PART ONE SUMMARY
In the automotive world, the production of one part for one automobile takes multiple factories and vehicles and men and machines and transport methods. Your body has about 100 trillion cells and each cell is far more complex than any factory. As I have mentioned previously, you also have about ten microorganisms per cell, mostly bacteria and viruses, so you are a living planet. But instead of needing thousands of people and machines and vehicles and large numbers of components all required to build an automobile, you simply needed a mother and a father.
In order to accomplish the simple task of replacing a part in an automobile, a mechanic needs to have the car brought into a garage and in most cases plug it into a diagnostic machine to determine what is not quite right with the automobile. A mechanic needs a wide range of tools to fix automobiles and access to auto part suppliers to get parts. If an auto has been in an accident, the mechanic needs more skills to repair and repaint what he can and replace what he cannot to restore the appearance of the automobile. As we discuss design, we have first looked primarily at the process of construction of an automobile. In part two, we will discuss repair of the automobile and why that process points us back to design. In part three, we will focus on the designers of automobiles and review the need for intelligence as the first stage of the construction of an automobile, just as intelligence was needed for the construction of living creatures. Hopefully, once you think of all aspects of the question you will be convinced that evolution must be cast aside as a philosophy based in ignorance. People in the 19th Century trying to avoid God did not know much about organisms, but they do now and they have no excuse for continuing the charade. See you in part two!
RELIGION BEFORE EVIDENCE IS THE RULING PARADIGM
Evolution must depend on completely naturalistic causes. The word is used by secular scientists not only to explain the variety of organisms in all their forms on the world both now and in the past, but it is also applied to the development of the first life, and it is also applied to the formation of stars and planets and moons and other space objects. Finally, it depends upon a completely naturalistic explanation for the beginning of the Universe. So when you discuss evolution, you must realize that the believers in evolution in the pure form, they are atheistic naturalistic materialistic humanists with no place for the idea of God. Darwinists (my name for these true believers) have no room for God. The question of Evolution versus Creation is really first a religious or philosophical question and second comes the evidence. If evidence was considered FIRST, there would be as many followers of evolution as there are of the Flying Spaghetti Monster.
Now, before I leave this preliminary discussion, keep in mind that most Darwinists like to try to bring as many Christians and other Theists into the fold in some way or another as possible. The NCSE, while dedicated to censorship of any non-Darwinist evidence, does try to recruit as many Theists as possible in order to keep the evidence away from the masses. If they can convince any believers to accept evolution in any form, the Darwinists will let them believe that God created and then allowed evolution to build organisms from some simple starting point. In this way, the evidence that refutes evolution can be kept away from students while mollifying these Theists with a compromise that is far more disastrous to the underpinnings of the Christian faith than they apparently realize. So organizations like BioLogos exist, apparently blissfully unaware that you simply cannot mix evolution and creation.
HOW TO BE COMPLETELY ILLOGICAL AND CALL IT SCIENCE
Blind undirected chance is nothing like design at all, nothing!!! Not only that, evolution does not simply count on blind undirected chance but also counts upon substances to be available for chance to work on, substances for which evolution cannot account.
HOW TO BE COMPLETELY ILLOGICAL AND CALL IT SCIENCE
Blind undirected chance is nothing like design at all, nothing!!! Not only that, evolution does not simply count on blind undirected chance but also counts upon substances to be available for chance to work on, substances for which evolution cannot account.
The Big Bang is simply a product of imagination. The vast majority of energy and mass required to allow for the standard Big Bang hypothesis has never been observed, nor does it have any explanation for the starting point (that famous singularity) nor for the so-called Planck Time that is opposed to the laws of nature...as is a singularity that cannot be accounted for by natural means. The Big Bang is just an almost infinite series of miracles with no miracle source provided. The Laws of Thermodynamics firmly deny that this could happen.
But we'll not bother with that for now. Assume that the Universe exists and natural laws and energy and entropy and all the stars and planets including the Solar System are in place. It is a huge assumption but we'll pretend that it is possible. We have the Earth and Sun and everything in the sky in place. Now all we need is life.
The Law of Biogenesis precludes life developing from non-life. If you do a search on this blog you will see lots of posts that discuss this. But Darwinists seem to think that if you simply say that someone has "an interesting idea" or is "working on a new hypothesis" that it is okay to pretend a firmly established law of science does not exist. They'll never do better than pretend that the "check is in the mail" concerning the formation of life from non-life because life is obviously designed. Life has every single hallmark of being designed.
DESIGN IS EVERYWHERE
DESIGN IS EVERYWHERE
William Paley made the comparison to a man walking along and finding a pocket watch and instantly seeing that he'd found something that had been made rather than some natural formation. A watch is intricately designed and it is meant to accomplish something. Furthermore, a pocket watch would also need to be set to the right time and wound up in order to keep time, thus accomplishing it's purpose. Designed things have some things in common:
Usefulness (a purpose for the thing that is made).
Intention (a response to the need for the thing to be made).
Intelligent input (a mind that was able to conceive something that could meet the need).
Design (a plan to produce the thing that has been conceived).
Parts that work together to accomplish the intended task (requiring an overall design template).
Raw Materials (the stuff that is made into parts that, when assembled, comprise the made thing).
Processing (the means by which the materials are converted into usable form for the thing).
Assembly Instructions (the rubber-meets-the-road step by step guide to assembly of the thing).
Assembly Plant or Person (the person, people or people and robots that assemble the thing).
Okay, I could keep going, I think you have the idea. For someone to make a thing it will usually require most or all of the above aspects of construction and more. If you are going to whittle a forked stick to catch snakes, you need you, your brain, the right forked branch of a tree and a knife. If you are making a jet airplane, you need more steps by far than those listed above. A compendium of articles about intelligent design are found here.
AUTOMOBILE MANUFACTURING
AUTOMOBILE MANUFACTURING
Now in this case I am only discussing, for instance, a machine or building or bridge or anything else like that. I will discuss the automobile in particular. Organisms are far more complex than such things. Organisms do not just exist and operate and meet a purpose, they are also capable of operating while repairing themselves AND also they reproduce themselves without any need for a factory or team of engineers or workers to put them together. Organisms are self-replicating organic machines that also interact with and respond to their environment and perform tasks like feed themselves and find places to reside and in many cases care for their young and perhaps teach them as well. Organisms are filled with information with a coding system far more sophisticated than anything mankind uses and with myriad machines and systems that are constantly operating to enable the organisms to exist and reproduce. Obviously we have no automobiles that can reproduce or fuel themselves or repair themselves or determine where to park safely. Automobiles do not sense things happening around them and make decisions about such happenings (although newer cars have been programmed to do some sensing of other cars and what is happening on the road, all of which is programmed into them by mankind and not anything naturally occurring within them). I have some doubts about the wisdom of allowing cars to decide when to brake, especially when you have to deal with a deer suddenly crossing the road or see an accident about to happen - will your years of driving experience and instant judgment of whether to brake or turn or step on the gas be hindered by an automobile programmed for only one response in such a case?
So automobiles are quite simple compared to organisms. Yet they take an amazing amount of work and planning and materials and manpower and thinking and design and decisions and multiple factories of all sorts to build them. Key to the existence of automobiles is the existence of engineers. In fact, we tend to take engineers for granted but engineers are involved in the production of everything from wood screws to space shuttles. By understanding how engineers think, we can then look back at organisms and understand to an extent why they are very similar in structure even if they look very different. Then, if you have common sense, you will appreciate the First Engineer and see that many aspects of organisms that reflect their design by one designer.
I worked in the auto industry for about 15 years, from lowly new hire on the factory floor to veteran worker qualified to work on every single line in the plant. I became an auditor and did an audit of the factory. I qualified as a mechanic (and worked as a mechanic in a previous factory) and I qualified as a forklift driver (and actually had to pass a test and obtain a license). I learned the systems used to keep an inventory in real time, which involved scanning materials or finished goods from one place to another until finally loaded on a truck. I worked in the quality assurance department and monitored the output of various lines. I did inventories. I was firefighter-trained and put out a couple of big fires (we had firehoses in almost every department and warehouse because of the very high heat needed to mold some items and produce the moldable fabric-and-resin padding that was integral to some of our most expensive and lucrative parts). I joined the salaried ranks and worked with the engineers in the design area and operated the computers and machinery that controlled various mechanisms and materials in tall silos, I was a supervisor and had to watch over groups of workers making parts or doing cleanups or painting or repairs. I was qualified to operate various presses and machines and vehicles and lines, do maintenance work and even repair and troubleshooting machines. I had keys to operate every forklift, open the control panels of every press and most doors. For awhile I had my own air-conditioned office with my boombox playing and me reading novels and magazines while watching two computer screens and pushing the right keys at the right times. Way too many "I" sentences, but the reason for this is to set the stage for explaining how automobiles are made and how that relates to God and creation. I know enough about the auto industry to make the comparison.
MORE THAN ONE FACTORY AND MORE THAN ONE FACTOR
MORE THAN ONE FACTORY AND MORE THAN ONE FACTOR
Automobiles are not made by a factory alone. The factory is the last stage of a long process involved in the "birth" of an automobile. First someone visualizes a car. Then the idea must be transferred to blueprints and concept drawings. Then the idea is approved and after years the auto can be produced. The raw materials must be obtained by all the various factories that build the parts that get sent to the automobile factories to assemble the cars. Any automobile is assembled from parts that are sourced from many factories. Some make the glass for the windows and some make the steel that will be stamped into forms that become the frame or fenders or used in making the engine. There are factories that make the insulation materials, the lamps and headlights, the rugs for the floor, the sound systems, the seat covers, the seat padding, the springs, the shocks, the exhaust system, the spark plugs, the timing belt and so on and so forth.
So before any factory makes any part of any automobile, the automobile must be designed. This takes years of work before a design is converted to instructions and specifications for each component of said automobile. Every part must meet standards that are defined by engineers. Every portion of the assembly process of each sub-assembly is subject to exact instructions and then the actual assembly of the vehicle itself is also subject to specific instructions in order to produce a vehicle that was imagined and designed by engineers. Engineers make an overall design and then more engineers work on individual parts and then other engineers cull together the designs of the other engineers to decide on a final assembly blueprint.
At my factory, we would get the blueprints for a proposed automobile several years in advance. We would be given the opportunity to provide the specific insulation products for every place on that automobile that required insulation from heat or cold or to dampen sound or to provide additional strength to an assembly integral to the automobile. The engineers at each auto maker would give us their preliminary designs and ask our company to propose the parts we could provide for said automobile within the specifications provided and give a per-part price for each of those products our factory could make. Negotiations would be made between our engineers and their engineers and their buyers and our sales team for an initial agreement of estimated costs and then, once the automobile design was finalized, the approximate price for an approximately specified part would now be converted into final specifications and requirements and final costs. As I said, this would usually take at least three or four years from first blueprints submitted to us to final specifications and prices for each part of that automobile we were given the contract to produce.
This means our company needed engineers to determine what materials would be used for each part and which line the part would be made on and what machines would be used in the process and whether it would be necessary to have to purchase any new machinery or have any new molds obtained from yet another factory in order for our company to make the parts. Then our buyers would finalize the initial contracts negotiated with our suppliers according to the specifications we had given them which of course resulted from the specifications the auto maker had charged us to meet with our parts. So other factories and material suppliers had to design and engineer the parts or price and source the raw materials and agree to a set price for what they provided to us so that we could provide a set price to the automaker, which would then make a complete automobile and offer a price to their dealers to purchase new vehicles which they would then mark up and offer to the public. Automakers would also make fleet agreements with large companies or entire nations to provide large quantities of their cars in bulk for a lesser rate than they would charge auto dealers.
For many years we made the floor liners for General Motors C-Body cars, many of which were bound for Saudi Arabia and a few other Arab nations. They simply loved the style of GM cars that somewhat resembled big Dial Soap bars. It was astounding how many cars get sold all over the world, judging by the amount of parts we cranked out for GM and Ford and Chrysler and Toyota and other companies! Anyway, the floor liner for GM cars was made in two basic styles (front and back) and then there were two different die cuts that could be made, one for an automobile with a floor shift and one for an automobile with a column shift, as I recall.
GETTING SPECIFIC - JUST ONE BASIC PART
GETTING SPECIFIC - JUST ONE BASIC PART
The C-Body floor liners began as a mixture of mostly chopped up new fabric and scrap underwear plus a mix of resin with a couple of other secret ingredients. It would be mixed together and baked in a very long oven and come out as a thick blanket about six feet wide and six inches high. At the end of the line was a press that cut the blanket into parts. This took place on one line in the Padding department at the West end of the factory, far from the Hot Mold department.
Then the parts would be stacked on pallets and forklifted to a holding area where huge shelves designed to hold large pallets and large boxes could take three layers of such parts and therefore build up a surplus of the parts. Another forklift operator from the Hot Mold department would come and grab the pallets of padded parts as the mold press operators were about to run out of raw materials. At the time the factory was busiest, there were at least eight massive presses assigned to big padded parts and another six for smaller hot mold parts and three carousels and five big cutting presses. There was also an oven line for a different style of foam and asphalt-based parts that had several small presses and a set of presses that could mold fiberglass parts and apply a foil covering to them and a fiberglass-cutting area. The department would use some presses for different jobs at different times so we could be very versatile. Working forklift in Hot Mold required planning and powers of observation because if you were late supplying parts a line would go empty and if you didn't grab finished part boxes then people would run out of room.
Meanwhile, a pair of silos, one eight stories high and one six stories high held the raw materials and machinery that mixed various substances like asphalt and limestone and rubber, depending on the specific mix for the specific part, that were operated by one computer operator per silo. I was one who ran the silo with two lines and others ran the silo with only one line. My silo had three main mixers, two lines, two scrap feeds and multiple bins of substances and switches and banks of electric panels and tanks of liquids and lots of valves and levers and just an amazing number of things that could go wrong and I had to know what button to push, what big bin to whack with a long steel pole or what valve to thump with a small sledge when something went awry. But when all was well I sat and listened to music and read and put my feet up in air-conditioned comfort. Loved that job!
Among the parts those lines made were the sheets of what we termed "mastic" which were composed of asphalt and limestone plus other ingredients blended and baked and flattened and cut to a dimension slightly larger than the hot molded flooring parts being made for C-Body cars in Hot Mold. Think of roofing without little rocks and you would be pretty close to envisioning the composition of the sheets, only much bigger (In fact our plant once made roofing shingles). These would be stacked on pallets and also put in a holding area by a forklift operator, this one with steel shelving that was much more narrow and designed for smaller pallets. The carousel operator would yell at a forklift driver (if the driver did not notice) when he was running low on mastic for the line and the forklift would grab a pallet off of the shelves and bring it to the carousel where the mastic was stacked on a short, strong steel table.
ACTUAL PRODUCTION
In Hot Mold department we would feed the padding parts into 250-500 ton presses heated with 450 degree hot oil that circulated through the molds as we pressed the fabric blankets down with heat and pressure into relatively stiff and hardened parts roughly approximating the floor of the front or back seat of a normal large GM vehicle. The parts would then be tossed on a production line, where they would be grabbed and tossed on a carousel that used heat to glue and seal a sheet of an asphalt-limestone barrier atop the part and would clamp down on it with an ice-cold die before the carousel operator snagged the now-sealed parts off the carousel bucks before tossing them (since we would do two at a time) onto the line to be cut by the die press operators and, after cutting, the parts would go to the folks at the end of the line who would check them for errors, put them in boxes and label and seal them for forklift drivers to grab and scan into inventory in the warehouse. The hot press operators would toss out any bad padding or parts that molded incorrectly, the carousel operator would toss anything bad they missed and then the die press operator would also check the parts for problems before letting them go down the line to the end. In our factory, every station or step of every production line had operators trained to spot problems and cast out bad parts or even call a halt to the line to fix a problem involving fixing a problem with a press or oven or other piece of machinery.
Once the boxes were counted and sealed, a forklift operator would take them to a staging area and scan them out of the department and then another forklift operator would take the boxes and scan them in to a holding area of the warehouse. Later a truck would come to pick up boxes of the parts and yet another forklift operator would scan the parts out of inventory and into shipment status and carry the boxes onto the truck until it was filled with the assigned boxes for that truck. A shipping manager would check the scanned boxes against the shipment status list and okay each truck to be dispatched.
Then the parts would be stacked on pallets and forklifted to a holding area where huge shelves designed to hold large pallets and large boxes could take three layers of such parts and therefore build up a surplus of the parts. Another forklift operator from the Hot Mold department would come and grab the pallets of padded parts as the mold press operators were about to run out of raw materials. At the time the factory was busiest, there were at least eight massive presses assigned to big padded parts and another six for smaller hot mold parts and three carousels and five big cutting presses. There was also an oven line for a different style of foam and asphalt-based parts that had several small presses and a set of presses that could mold fiberglass parts and apply a foil covering to them and a fiberglass-cutting area. The department would use some presses for different jobs at different times so we could be very versatile. Working forklift in Hot Mold required planning and powers of observation because if you were late supplying parts a line would go empty and if you didn't grab finished part boxes then people would run out of room.
Meanwhile, a pair of silos, one eight stories high and one six stories high held the raw materials and machinery that mixed various substances like asphalt and limestone and rubber, depending on the specific mix for the specific part, that were operated by one computer operator per silo. I was one who ran the silo with two lines and others ran the silo with only one line. My silo had three main mixers, two lines, two scrap feeds and multiple bins of substances and switches and banks of electric panels and tanks of liquids and lots of valves and levers and just an amazing number of things that could go wrong and I had to know what button to push, what big bin to whack with a long steel pole or what valve to thump with a small sledge when something went awry. But when all was well I sat and listened to music and read and put my feet up in air-conditioned comfort. Loved that job!
Among the parts those lines made were the sheets of what we termed "mastic" which were composed of asphalt and limestone plus other ingredients blended and baked and flattened and cut to a dimension slightly larger than the hot molded flooring parts being made for C-Body cars in Hot Mold. Think of roofing without little rocks and you would be pretty close to envisioning the composition of the sheets, only much bigger (In fact our plant once made roofing shingles). These would be stacked on pallets and also put in a holding area by a forklift operator, this one with steel shelving that was much more narrow and designed for smaller pallets. The carousel operator would yell at a forklift driver (if the driver did not notice) when he was running low on mastic for the line and the forklift would grab a pallet off of the shelves and bring it to the carousel where the mastic was stacked on a short, strong steel table.
ACTUAL PRODUCTION
In Hot Mold department we would feed the padding parts into 250-500 ton presses heated with 450 degree hot oil that circulated through the molds as we pressed the fabric blankets down with heat and pressure into relatively stiff and hardened parts roughly approximating the floor of the front or back seat of a normal large GM vehicle. The parts would then be tossed on a production line, where they would be grabbed and tossed on a carousel that used heat to glue and seal a sheet of an asphalt-limestone barrier atop the part and would clamp down on it with an ice-cold die before the carousel operator snagged the now-sealed parts off the carousel bucks before tossing them (since we would do two at a time) onto the line to be cut by the die press operators and, after cutting, the parts would go to the folks at the end of the line who would check them for errors, put them in boxes and label and seal them for forklift drivers to grab and scan into inventory in the warehouse. The hot press operators would toss out any bad padding or parts that molded incorrectly, the carousel operator would toss anything bad they missed and then the die press operator would also check the parts for problems before letting them go down the line to the end. In our factory, every station or step of every production line had operators trained to spot problems and cast out bad parts or even call a halt to the line to fix a problem involving fixing a problem with a press or oven or other piece of machinery.
Once the boxes were counted and sealed, a forklift operator would take them to a staging area and scan them out of the department and then another forklift operator would take the boxes and scan them in to a holding area of the warehouse. Later a truck would come to pick up boxes of the parts and yet another forklift operator would scan the parts out of inventory and into shipment status and carry the boxes onto the truck until it was filled with the assigned boxes for that truck. A shipping manager would check the scanned boxes against the shipment status list and okay each truck to be dispatched.
We made parts as big as the headliner for an entire passenger van to tiny pieces of stick-on sound deadening materials for spaces between thin and thick steel assemblies. We made parts for all the major auto makers of the world and also a few companies that made heavy construction equipment, tractors and even riding lawn mowers. We made parts made primarily of fabric or asphalt and limestone and rubber and fiberglass and foil and some with adhesive covered with plastic designed to rip off and stick on and some hardened to tensile strength near steel and some as floppy as an old blanket. When my company was doing well, we had hundreds of workers working all three shifts six and seven days a week and a few dozen mechanics, a few dozen supervisors and handfuls of engineers and auditors and of course office staff and janitors and electricians and draftsmen and a few other specialists.
ADDITIONAL ELEMENTS OF THE PRODUCTION PROCESS
ADDITIONAL ELEMENTS OF THE PRODUCTION PROCESS
In order to make parts more efficiently, we had groups that worked on Kaizen (continual improvement) concepts to come up with more efficient ways to make what we produced. As part of one such group, we would be rewarded with bonuses for ideas that saved the company money or time or found uses for things usually thrown away. We also worked on ways to make things safer in the plant, for there were so many substances that were toxic or were heated to dangerous temperatures used in our factory and so many machines that could chop off a hand or swallow an arm or even flat kill you if you were careless, so finding ways to avoid accidents was also a priority. Fires had burned a couple of employees to the point that they were given full disability pay, so looking for ways to avoid or more quickly put out fires was always a topic of conversation.
THE FACTORY VERSION OF MUTATIONS - ACCIDENTS
One of my friends had a hand cut off, one had an arm compressed up to his shoulder between big steel rollers and had unreal agony as well as eventually losing the arm. A woman I knew slightly was burned in a big fire and got disability. Several back injuries and bad falls caused a few employees to take disability and leave. We convinced the company to take some important safety measures so that any openings to cutting or compressing machinery that could be screened off would be. We got more fire hoses put in. Thank God no one died in an accident while I was there, although at least one employee did die on another shift. One of my friends was blinded completely in one eye and all but blinded in other by calcium oxide, a substance used by the lines that made the asphalt and rubber-based products. It was helpful in breaking down scrap that was mixed and put in with the new batches of black stuff we called "making dirt into money" and sometimes I would toss a bag into the big final mixer when I needed to change the stiffness of the mix quickly. He was trying to blow out the calcium oxide feed line and it blew back at him, knocking off his safety glasses and filling his eyes. From that time forward people had to wear helmets in order to do that, but it was too late for my friend.
So one part that would go under the rug on the floorboards of GM C-Body cars required the Padding line, one of the Mastic lines, the Hot Mold department and of course forklifts and the warehouse and many workers and many raw materials and many different production lines and presses. It needed to be heated and cooled and, by the way, each department also had quality assurance measures in place, with quality assurance people checking on parts on a schedule to monitor the processes. Each department required relief men to take the place of the workers so the workers could get their breaks and their lunch time. Each department had a foreman and there would also be department supervisors. So C-Body floor parts required the efforts of several departments in the factory, with each department using at least 12 people for that particular part and others who would move the parts and ship them out after manufacture. This C-Body part was just one of thousands of parts that would go into making a C-Body automobile, made from components produced by dozens of factories and involving semi-trucks and rail lines and all eventually being sent to the main GM plant involved where hundreds of people would be involved in assembly and quality control and all the other aspects of a factory would now be focused on actually making an automobile. But think of the dozens of factories making components for the automobile. One could say that many thousands of workers and supervisors and engineers and mechanics and quality control people and drivers and so on were all needed to make one C-Body car.
PART ONE SUMMARY
In the automotive world, the production of one part for one automobile takes multiple factories and vehicles and men and machines and transport methods. Your body has about 100 trillion cells and each cell is far more complex than any factory. As I have mentioned previously, you also have about ten microorganisms per cell, mostly bacteria and viruses, so you are a living planet. But instead of needing thousands of people and machines and vehicles and large numbers of components all required to build an automobile, you simply needed a mother and a father.
In order to accomplish the simple task of replacing a part in an automobile, a mechanic needs to have the car brought into a garage and in most cases plug it into a diagnostic machine to determine what is not quite right with the automobile. A mechanic needs a wide range of tools to fix automobiles and access to auto part suppliers to get parts. If an auto has been in an accident, the mechanic needs more skills to repair and repaint what he can and replace what he cannot to restore the appearance of the automobile. As we discuss design, we have first looked primarily at the process of construction of an automobile. In part two, we will discuss repair of the automobile and why that process points us back to design. In part three, we will focus on the designers of automobiles and review the need for intelligence as the first stage of the construction of an automobile, just as intelligence was needed for the construction of living creatures. Hopefully, once you think of all aspects of the question you will be convinced that evolution must be cast aside as a philosophy based in ignorance. People in the 19th Century trying to avoid God did not know much about organisms, but they do now and they have no excuse for continuing the charade. See you in part two!