Thoughts in a Haystack

Yes, we are much better served by looking for neuroanatomy in Michelangelo's secret messages encoded in the images of the Sistine Chapel:

http://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/post.cfm?id=michelangelos-secret-message-in-the-2010-05-26
 

Cue: All Things Dull and Ugly
 

There's a better demolition of Mr Gordon's simple-minded thinking: we actually have a very good idea why most of the things you mention bear a resemblance and it's the physics.

Those galaxies that spiral (and not all do) do so because of the way gravity, rotation and uneven distribution of matter work together. Cochleasand 'sea shells' are similar because the math underlying the physics of sound and of packing in growth have similarities that make spirals optimum patterns given constraints they are under. Brain coral and our brains are subject to the same utility in maximizing their outer surface area (coral because that's where the food is, brain because underneath is where the wiring goes), and those convolutions are a good way to do the job when you can't fully use 3 dimensions. Retinal capillaries and lighting bolts both have wandering paths because their paths are determined through exploratory 'behaviour' with each seeking its goal (lightning a path for electrical discharge, capillaries regions of cells with low oxygen) by whatever is the easiest route at that instant without the planning that would result in an overall shortest path That's why they meander.

It's not really about seeing patterns or similarities where they don't exist, but rather of seeing similarities that do exist but attributing them to God putting a thumb in when it's actually due to the natural workings of physics on different scales and types of organisms and organs.

Mr Gordon's thinking is about at the level of that fifth-grader he refers to. It's about as profound as proclaiming wonder that both feathers and bowling balls fall when you drop them without wondering if instead of intelligent falling what you've got going on is gravity.

The exploratory behaviour of blood vessels is something I picked up thanks to Kirschner & Gerhart' excellent and thought-inducing 'The Plausibility of Life' which gets into a lot of the mechanics behind how we get from DNA to actual bodies. They tie the physical mechanisms of development, like how blood vessels 'know' where to go, in with the mechanisms the body uses to maintain and repair itself so that you can see that the elaboration of our genetic code seems less unlikely and how it is that genetic variation can be accomodated in actual bodies. Because much of the development is done by exploratory behaviour, if the genes say to grow more bones somewher (like an extra finger), the nerves, muscles and blood vessels are likely to just follow along, supply a biochemically signalled need induced by the bone growth. I'm sure I'm doing it no justice, but it's the most profound of the evo-devo books I've read, all IMHO.
 

Sure, there may be underlying natural laws that result in similarities but that's not what he was arguing. He began and ended with "they look alike therefore they're designed." It would actually be a (slightly) better argument to say that such similarities are due to "common design." But then he'd have to answer why all coral aren't brain coral.