My RSS feeder is clogged with feeds, to the point where I am “fed” about 2000 new articles a day, of which I can only read a fraction. Nonetheless, I keep adding to them, and I would plug the newest addition.
By way of background, I enjoy science blogs, particularly those devoted to evolution. One is them is Why Evolution is True, by Jerry Coyne, author of a book of the same name. Yesterday he posted about a leading “Intelligent Design” advocate named William Dembski, who claimed to have refuted evolution by pointing out that it was impossible for ants to have developed one of their behaviors: the fact that they tend to take the shortest path between two points. This from Dembski:
Now here’s an interesting twist: Colonies of ants, when they make tracks from one colony to another minimize path-length and thereby also solve the Steiner Problem (see “Ants Build Cheapest Network“). So what does this mean in evolutionary terms? In ID terms, there’s no problem — ants were designed with various capacities, and this either happens to be one of them or is one acquired through other programmed/designed capacities. On Darwinian evolutionary grounds, however, one would have to say something like the following: ants are the result of a Darwinian evolutionary process that programmed the ants with, presumably, a genetic algorithm that enables them, when put in separate colonies, to trace out paths that resolve the Steiner Problem. In other words, evolution, by some weird self-similarity, embedded an evolutionary program into the neurophysiology of the ants that enables them to solve the Steiner problem (which, presumably, gives these ants a selective advantage).
I should pause here to say that it is never a problem to explain anything from an ID perspective, since one explanation (God did it) fits all, although I’ve never seen an explanation for why so many things in nature aren’t terribly well designed from any common sense perspective, like the giraffe’s laryngeal nerve.
Coyne links to Myrmecos, which is, of all things, a blog devoted to ants and other such creatures, where Alex Wild explains the behavior quite simply, and guess what, Jesus didn’t do it. In a nutshell, ants lay down a scent, which their compatriots follow. The scent is strongest along the shortest path:
When two points (say, two nests, or a nest and a food source) need to be connected, ants may start out tracing several winding pheromone paths among them. As ants zing back and forth down trails, pheromone levels build up. Long trails take more time to travel, so long-trail ants makes fewer overall circuits, more pheromone dissipates between passes, and the trails end up poorly marked. Short trails enable ants to make more trips, less time elapses between passes, so these trails end up marked more strongly. The shortest trail emerges.
Apparently, this phenomenon is well known, and Dembski could have discovered it with a bit of googling before Wild addressed it. But that would have ruined his narrative. This tactic of simply ignoring established evidence is typical of the right, across the board. It works in the short term, in politics as well as religion, to play on people’s ignorance to push your own agenda. It even works in the long term, if you can constantly distract people today, and get them to forget that you were wrong yesterday, the day before that, and the day before that.
But, I rant, when I mean to plug. Wild is a photographer, and his blog is chock full of some great insect photography as well as fascinating information about ants, wasps, etc. Check it out.
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