Oolon Colluphid

And ref 'alien' species out-competing native ones (despite each organism being designed as perfect for its habitat), I ought to mention <a href="http://www.cabi-bioscience.org/html/japanese_knotweed_alliance.htm" target="_blank">Japanese knotweed</a>, and see also here:

<a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/1343912.stm" target="_blank">http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/1343912.stm</a>

Oolon

beausoleil

Very impressive and interesting. Why not add 'a belief in creationism widespread in human beings that would, if followed to its logical conclusion, result in disease and death on a massive scale'. If I were a creator, I wouldn't create, as part of this environment, creatures that believed in creationism. It's clearly a design flaw.

But what's the betting we see it repackaged as an anti-evolution argument within 3 months? "How can 'survival of the fittest' be true if there are all these unfit species..."

Or, a bit more subtly, as a 'no content' argument - evolution explains both species traits well adapted to their environment and species traits badly adapted to their environment. In short - anything at all.

There's no way of winning the debate since the other side don't make decisions based on evidence. Can we just wait for them to become extinct?

(Edited to add "n't" to "would"!)

[ August 14, 2002: Message edited by: beausoleil ]</p>

Quetzal

No, no, no. Creationism, like all religious memes, is a <a href="http://www.closetatheist.com/virusesofthemind.htm" target="_blank">parasite of the mind</a>.

Oolon Colluphid

Ah, but that’s exactly my point. You can’t tell hypotheses apart by reference to things they all predict, you do it by reference to points where they make contrasting predictions. This is why I feel the Argument from Poor Design is so powerful.

Both creation and evolution predict well-adapted organisms: the former by positing an intelligent designer; the latter by noting that improvements will tend to spread within populations and become the norm: repeat algorithically, and you get good design.

But only evolution, by stating that improvements are based on what’s already present, also predicts that ‘design’ will be constrained by history, and so predicts the design oddities and plain poor design (with hindsight).

Creation, however, does not predict poor design. Creation, at its most basic, states that living things are not all related: they were designed separately, each according to its need (or some such). The creator had a blank slate for each 'kind' (whateverthehell that is ). And the creator is usually credited with intelligence -- the reason for invoking one in the first place is to explain biological wonders.

Therefore, find examples of plain poor design in nature, and the creation hypothesis is refuted -- or the designer is not as advertised. See above.

If the creator can do eyes, it should know that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line. Yet the recurrent laryngeal nerve indicates he/she/it does not know this... or was not involved in the design.

Cheers, Oolon

[ August 14, 2002: Message edited by: Oolon Colluphid ]</p>

Quetzal

Hey Oolon.

I’ve got another for your collection. Not the “What idiot would design this?” collection, but the other one: “Who in their right mind would worship something that would create this?” collection. Sit back, boys and girls, and hear about the most gruesome critter on Earth.

I talking about the parasitic wasp Copidosoma floridanum. As with most parasitic wasps, this one lays its eggs on a caterpillar – the larvae of the cabbage looper moth (Trichoplusia ni). The wasp typically lays two eggs – one male and one female. So far, nothing unusual. However, after starting mitosis, the cluster of embryonic wasp cells divides itself up into hundreds of smaller clusters, each of which begins to develop into separate wasp larvae. One egg becomes 1200+ clones. Around 200 of these little clusters develop faster than others, becoming larvae in as little as four days. These 200 larvae – all female – are known as soldiers. They have sharp mandibles and tapered tails. They wrap their tails around the breathing spicules of the caterpillar to anchor themselves.

The job of these soldiers is simple. They live only to kill other wasps. Any wasp larva that passes by, whether from other Copidosoma or other parasitic wasp, causes the soldier to lash out from its hiding place, snag the larva in its mandibles, and suck it dry. As the slaughter goes on, the rest of the original larvae develop and finally grow into about a thousand more wasp larvae. These are known as reproductives – evenly divided between male and female. Since the soldiers have eliminated all competition, these reproductives are little more than a mouth attached to a gut – drifting freely through the caterpillar’s circulatory system sucking nutrients.

As a coda to this quasi-eusocial system, the soldiers now turn on their siblings – more precisely their brothers. The soldiers selectively kill the males so that the vast majority of survivors are female. After all, males are just sperm donors. You don’t need a whole lot of them. Caterpillers are hard to come by, but males will easily be able to mate close to home, with their sisters.

For the grand finale, the soldiers, who have absolutely no adaptation that allows them to escape from the inside of the caterpillar, die with their host. (From Zimmer, “Parasite Rex”, ppg 49-50)

Blinn

And I had to have surgery to fix the effects of this moronic plumbing job:

This can cause a <a href="http://www.urologychannel.com/varicocele/index.shtml" target="_blank">varicocele</a>
And this happens in 10-20% of men! It felt like I was walking around with a chicken egg down there! Thanks gawd...

Oolon Colluphid

Ah, that’s where I’d read it! (By Darwin, my memory’s getting bad in me old age! It’s not like I’ve got that many parasitology books!) I really must get back and finish reading it... Many thanks Morpho! <img src="graemlins/notworthy.gif" border="0" alt="[Not Worthy]" />

To all: Zimmer’s Parasite Rex is enormously recommended. Easy to read and fascinating, and nearly everything in it (well the first hundred pages so far at least ) is of the “who’d worship the creator of this?” variety. But that’s parasitism all over. (As indeed they usually are .)

Oolon

bluefugue

It doesn't rule it out, though. The designer could be lazy, or insane, or sadistic, or drunk. (Admittedly Christians might not accept these possibilities.)

Oolon Colluphid

Exactly. Maybe the designer had good days and bad days. Means he’s not ‘perfectly-good’, though, dunnit?!

Lazy I think we can rule out: after all it’s not lazy to route the laryngeal an odd way or to add pelvis remnants to whales.

I like the ‘drunk’ idea -- good stuff when sober, but forgetful and uncoordinated when pissed.

Insane is unlikely too, unless the bouts of insanity came and went, as with ‘drunk’.

Sadistic would apply for most parasites and diseases, so that’s possible. A personal favourite too.

Another possibility of course would be ‘deceiver’. Deliberately planting evolution-like evidence to test our faith. (I guess no creationists promote that one? Anyone know? Note that to use the devil or the fall to account for these things is to credit them too with creationary abilities.) But surely not apparently existing is enough of a test? Isn’t he in danger of actually convincing us of his creationary inaction, of testing our faith to destruction?

Whichever (ad hoc) way you cut it, such a designer would be far too unlike the one claimed by creationism, which remains therefore refuted.

A designer of these other sorts would however probably be irrefutable. But since I don’t think anyone claims the ‘real’ creator is in this category, I won’t bother trying to find hypothesis divergences for it!

Oolon

bluefugue

Well then let me be the first to propose my new theory of:

"Drunken Design" (DD)!!!

I intend to start a multimillion dollar Institute for Drunken Design (IDD), and with any luck I will receive generous endowments from the Anheuser-Busch corporation. (They will also provide us with a crack team of highly trained lobbyists to use in Washington for purposes of introducing "DD Theory" into state science education standards, and for ruthlessly quashing the efforts of any "Stoned Design Theory" rivals.) The endowments will allow us to woo many real live PhD's away from their current underpaid university positions and pad my fledgling organization's roster with highly qualified professionals. Every three months we will publish a journal, the "Drunken Design Quarterly," in which all the latest exciting developments of this teeming, promising new frontier of biological science will be explored. When our articles are rejected for publication in Science and Nature, we will crow about the naturalistic bias of entrenched hardcore atheistic Darwinists in the so-called "mainstream" scientific establishment.

Finally, and most importantly, we're going to have a really slick website, with a high-tech metallic look and neat little Flash animations. And links to Budweiser.

And the quote-mining will be rampant. For starters, even hardcore Darwinist Oolon Colluphid admits: "A designer of these other sorts [i.e., drunken] would... ...probably be irrefutable."

[ August 15, 2002: Message edited by: IesusDomini ]</p>