summary

• The soul, the speaker says, isn't a sharp or deft enough tool to have created the baby before them. Human emotions are too clumsy to have crafted the extremely complex and demanding details of the baby's body—things like all the little bones and the ligaments controlling them; knees and the bones of the knuckles; the strong yet delicate webs of nerve cells and spinal bones; the complicated spine, with its pieces linked together like a chain.
• Just look, the speaker continues, at all the individual eyelashes and fingernails shaped like crisp half-moons, at the intricate ear, which looks like a shell as its parts curve inward around tinier and tinier bones. Just think of the imperceptibly small blood vessels, of the perfect way the lungs are linked together, of the microscopic clusters of protein inside of nerve cells, which allow the fully-formed body to respond to the brain's instructions.
• Look at all this and then try to name even a single emotion, thought, or feeling that's as straightforward and precise. It's impossible; no sense of longing or tenderness, no matter how rehearsed, could have accomplished what routine has done so flawlessly, and without care or concern, simply by way of the body's unthinking biological exactness. It's up to the mind's whims to create love, anguish, and dread, as well as the suffering these emotions cause.