Each plant and animal is exquisitely made; should not a supremely competent Designer have been able to make the intended variety from the start? The … - Carl Sagan

The fossil record implies trial and error, an inability to anticipate the future, features inconsistent with an efficient Great Designer.

Intuitive: The word conveys, I think, a diffuse annoyance at our inability to understand how we come by such knowledge.

The idea that a God or gods is necessary to effect one or more of these origins has been under repeated attack over the last few thousand years. Because we know something about phototropism and plant hormones, we can understand the opening of the morning glory independent of divine microintervention. It is the same for the entire skein of causality back to the origin of the universe. As we learn more and more about the universe, there seems less and less for God to do.

The brain must function during the renovation […] The old parts are in charge of too many fundamental functions for them to be replaced altogether. So they wheeze along, out of-date and sometimes counterproductive, but a necessary consequence of our evolution.