The Wellcome Trust has distributed false information about human anatomy to schools in an attempt to promote evolution and criticise intelligent design.
On 19th February, Truth in Science drew attention to a booklet defending evolution, sent to school teachers by the Wellcome Trust, a leading medical research charity. Since then, it has come to our attention that this contains false information about human anatomy.
Page Eight of the booklet Big Picture on Evolution has a section titled Design Flaws. This queries the idea that the human could be the work of a "skilled designer", by claiming that our bodies are "botched." Their prime example is a tube found in the male reproductive system:
"[This] example is the tube linking the mammalian testis to the penis (the vas deferens), which loops up and over the ureter - a bizarre and seemingly pointless detour. The solution to the riddle lies in the early ancestors of mammals, which had testes inside the body. As they descended during evolution, they could have gone behind or in front of the ureter. By chance, they went behind, so the vas deferens has to loop up and over, gradually lengthening as the testes descended."
This information is extremely misleading. The looping of the vas deferens over the ureter is very easily understood in the light of basic facts about anatomy and development.
Wellcome fails to mention that in every unborn male child, the testicles first develop inside the abdomen between the kidneys. Then, at about the 26/28th week of development, they begin to descend, and reach the scrotum soon before, or sometimes after, the time of birth. The pathway of the vas deferens is therefore due to an actual descent of the testes during the development of every male.
Furthermore, the descent of the testes is in front of (not behind, as Wellcome claim) the ureter. In their descent the testes are pulled by the hormonally-induced shortening of the gubernaculum testis, a bundle of connective-tissue fibres that connects to the anterior (frontal) body wall. The testes therefore move from being towards the rear of the body, to being at the front of the body. It is hard to imagine that their most direct pathway does not lie in front of the ureter.
The Wellcome Trust accompanies its text with a faulty diagram. This makes it appear that in humans, one vas deferens loops over the ureter (the wrong way) and the other does not.
The vas deferens that does not loop over the ureter in the diagram is presumably included for illustrative purposes only, to show what a “well-designed” layout would look like. But it does not go anywhere near the seminal vesicles and prostate, both of which must join with the vas deferens. The seminal vesicles are situated behind the bladder.
The Wellcome Trust seems to be hoodwinking children into thinking that the human body is not designed by: withholding information about human development, making a false claim about anatomy, and a presenting a misleading diagram. Why does one of the UK's leading medical research charities need to use such methods in order to criticise intelligent design?