The human body  

Wings
I once read an article talking about if humans had wings. Essentially, because of the muscles needed to move the wings and propell the body into the air the human torso would change from a flattened oval shape (as is now) into an almost round, compact muscular barrel. This would make us remarkably top heavy - a fact that could be countered by shortening the legs and bringing them forward on the body, towards the center of gravity. To counter the weight of such a mass of muscle anatomical changes would need to happen - such as hollowing the bones to lighten bodyweight.... in essence we would look like birds. I dont believe in God or a Designer either... but I'd say the design is mostly solid.

The human body I think is...
The human body I think is nearly fine. Growing older, I certainly see your point though. Human desire may be the most glaring flaw in the design. Or maybe not, depending on how you look at it. Ashes, ashes, they say, we all fall down. Mercifully,I hope, and maybe just in time.

Just a quick thought here,...
Just a quick thought here, with regard to life, it is rather apparent that we probably will not be able to live much longer lives (some theorists believe life expectancy in the US, despite advances in medicine, will actually decrease in the 21st century). Indeed, life expectancy in many other countries worldwide has been decreasing in the last 10 years, including the Soviet Union. While we cannot obviously live forever, we can choose to live more responsibly, with an interest toward stewardship and goodwill to others. dcwilson, in a seperate post, wrote very thoroughly about various issues of urban sprawl, population, pollution, etc., all of which I feel are going to enact increasing imperatives upon the human condition. I would recommend, with regard to this subject, the author, Wendell Berry, if you are not already familiar with him, a farmer from Kentucky, for lack of a better description, one of the greatest modernists of our time.

Immortality
I believe that the greatest flaw in the human body design is that it deteriorates so quickly. The goal of medicine is essentially to improve this 'design' flaw by extending life without any end other than our choosing.
As for the wings issue, I think it misses the point to say that gravity and physics in general would then reshape us. A body with wings that needn't become malformed would be the goal of better design, not simply the old muscles with wings attached...

The body seems less of a problem than the mind...
My wife's a physician and increasingly the problem seems to be we outlive our minds. As the baby boom ages, it will be interesting to see the largest age cohort in America be largely demented. One can almost foresee a new field of marketing emerging in response: Alzheimer Marketing for Dummies.
Oh, to cut to the chase, our minds are pretty crappy from the very start...full of nightmares, fears, prejudices and phobias. And then they are susceptible to being misinformed with the basest, cruelest ideas. And then once so misinformed very difficult to unmuddle.
And of course neuroscience shows empirically that the massively complex neural network of our brains is highly prone to misfires and irrational burn patterns even under the best of circumstances. Eye witness testimony is most unreliable as a result of everyone subjectively recalling what they have seen without even knowing they are distorting what they saw.
Add in a human mind's insidious tendency to self-actualize and self-aggrandize by creating out of hole cloth others it is better than and you have a highly untrustworth hunk of brain meat. Add to that it is encased in a skull that can barely protect it from harm from even slight trauma and you've got a very poorly designed organ and carrying case in my humble opinion.
that it can hallucinate and operate opposed thumbs is in many persons--particularly contemporary American politicians--its greatest distinction. Were it not for the brain's capacity for compassion in some, but apparently not enough persons, I am not sure its gifts of abstraction, logic, problem solving, and creation of beauty and function would be worth the horrible misuse the mind makes of virtually every worthwhile thing it develops.
Don't mean to be glum. The brain just does seem, on balance, a pretty weak design effort.

to go waaaaay positive for a chaser...
the brain's capacity for orgasm seems superbly functional, elegant, and pleasing, if a tad unpredictable. As someone once said: I've never had a bad orgasm. 🙂

If that's the goal of medicin...
If that's the goal of medicine, Brent, then the world is in way more trouble than I thought.

Can the brain be reprogrammed?
Does anyone know if our brain can be programmed to live longer(think futuristically)? Are our organs growing old or is the brain telling them to begin to die? We grow our organs and use chemicals early in life, then they turn off, so why can't we turn off the "older jeans". Any corrections on my thoughts would be appreciated.

We can control the rate at which an avocado ripens....
There is a specific gene that operates that clock.
We can using cross breeding and genetic engineering produce coniferous trees that grow to maturity in 2/3 or half the time of a conventional tree.
Theoretically, we can, or will soon be able, to alter the rates at which our bodies age.
However, complexity rears its hoary head very quickly in most genetic interventions in higher order organisms. For instance, you interfere with certain kinds of medicine and diet and make people's bodies live longer than there minds. The law of unintended consequences is triggered.
Next, you modify genes to make brain cells replace themselves faster than they die off later in life and you get longer brain life that leads to brains getting to big for their brain cases. Unintended consequences. I'm speaking hypothetically here. I don't know that this has occurred.
But the point is that it will take a lot of trial and error experimentation to extend the life cycle of the human mind and body with only unintended consequences we wish to tolerate.
What if you find a way to extend brain life, but find out that people's creativity and productivity plummit in the extended years.
I suspect that we WILL keep living longer for the foreseeable future in the prosperous countries and that we will keep living shorter and shorter lives in the less prosperous countries, as has been going on for perhaps a century now. We just will frequently find genes that will extend this or that useful life of this or that part of the human being. And this increment will net lead to longer life, though the quality of that added increment will sometimes be desirable and sometimes not.

Evolution
I sometimes wonder if drugs, Alchohol, smoking, obesity, poor diet, and many other factors are just part of the "survival of the fittest" part of evolution. Any comments?

I somehow have
the feeling that talking about life in a quantative matter: long,longer,longest, is a way of avoiding talking about quality of life. Does it really matters how many days you can fit into a human life? I think that there is a stage in life where you have experienced what was within reach, you have achieved the things you were capable of and seen those you wanted to see. I guess dcwilson is right in noticing that the brain is the weakest link. Even in good condition it lacks the ability to adapt to new values, different conditions. Of the people that I have seen growing really old, most were looking forward to some kind of ending. We are already too many on this planet...why try to stay longer? In most industrialized countries, of the total health care cost we spend during a lifetime, half is spend in the last 8-10 months. I would prefer passing on the savings.

Koen, that indeed, an assessm...
Koen, that indeed, an assessment of life with regard to quality, is what was missing here, and it is utterly astounding that it is so apparerently unrecogizable to not just some but the majority of the human population, which is going for a time to grow. We have just one earth to go.

I'm glad to see latter life...
I'm glad to see latter life health care costs mentioned here. In the US, I believe average medical costs in the last year of life for the elderly are considerably greater than the figure of 1/2 the cost over a lifetime, as Koen noted. In fact in many cases, they are 20 and 30 times greater than total previous cost, when heroic measures are used that insure at best ongoing suffering until the inevitable occurs. It is understandable I guess, given the money and emotion involved, to see why this can happen. So, thanks in part to the wonders of modern medicine, life expectancy in the US is now around 78, which is usually about 6 - 12 months after you have essentially stopped living. Life expectancy is increasing, but the thing which you can be most expectant of when you are ready to die is that you may very soon but not soon enough be dead.

I guess, some of it might have....
to do with the fact that these efforts to sustain life beyond quality are taken by younger people. In growing older (I am 63 as you know from the index...) I realized that in spite of numerous (too many) projects and some unfinished business, I am more inclined to "hand over the torch" and make room for the next generation than I ever expected. I am quite happy actually to live and work far enough from ambulance assitance to be sure that all available technology will come too late...this in spite of the fact that I had almost the opposite attitude ten or fifteen years ago. I guess that what I wanted to say is that a lot of these last-six-months-cost decisions may be made by the wrong people??