sakrilege

I have seen and read a lot about how males in different species compete to have their genes passed to the next generation. For example, male lions will kill cubs sired by a previous male and this will cause the females to ovulate again so the new male can impregnate them with his sperm. From a species point of view, this is wasteful since the cubs killed were already an investment in the future, killing them set the species back some. But for the individual male lion it is worth it.

My intuition says that this behaviour is consistent with evolution and inconsistent with creationism but I'm not sure how to express this. Am I thinking right?

pz

It is consistent with evolutionary theory. There is no theory of creationism, however, so there is nothing there with which the observation could be consistent or inconsistent.

It is plainly inconsistent with some religious formulations, though: for instance, it is not compatible with a good and caring, all-powerful god with human-like values.

Doubting Didymus

The fall! The fall! Turns out it's actually your fault!

Jobar

[Bart] It's not *my* fault, man![/Bart]

Lobstrosity

I agree with pz in that I don't think you could argue such behavior goes against creationism since creationism makes no predictions as to how organisms in any given species should behave. The "theory" simply says they were created by God, and thus any behavior is acceptable since no one can claim to know why God made them do what they do. Instead you get arguments like "God is perfect and God has his reasons...as humans we simply can't understand what those reasons were, but I assure you they must have been perfect" (at least this is the argument we kept getting from Keith in his "Why is the goal survival" thread).

I have my own shot to take at creationism, however: how do creationists explain why there is only one "kind" of mammal that lives solely in the water like fish? Of course here I speak of dolphins and whales, which are incredibly similar genetically speaking. Similarly, how do they explain why there is only one kind of mammal that can fly? Let's look at this logically for a minute. Creationists say that God created all the creatures on Earth as they are now. Clearly he created these creatures to be widely diverse. There are many different "kinds" of birds. There are many different "kinds" of reptiles. There are many different "kinds" of mammals. So why would God make only one mammal that could fly and only one that could live fully at sea? Why not create a vast diversity of mammalian life to fill these niches as well? It doesn't fit his pattern of creation and it really makes no sense. Evolution can provide a very reasonable explanation for this utilizing the fact that mammals are relatively new additions to the tree of life and simply haven't had the time to evolve such diversity in these areas. I don't know, does this argument hold any water at all from a logical standpoint?

Oolon Colluphid

Sure, it doesn’t make predictions about behaviour. But it does make predictions about design. You can (and I previously have) still use it against creation, because as sakrilege noted, this is a very wasteful system.

A reasonable prediction about an intelligent designer is that it would not design wasteful systems, since waste is not good design. And yet nature is incredibly wasteful. To have trees shed tons of pollen, and fish thousands of eggs, wastes materials. And it’s not as if the ‘designer’ didn’t know about less wasteful systems, or did not wish to use them for some reason, because he allegedly did design the less wasteful methods of pollen vectors (eg insects / orchids -- aren’t orchids beautifully ‘designed’ for this? Surely the hand of a designer there?) and fewer eggs / more parental care for many other species. He used them himself... and yet also used highly profligate other ones too.

And as with Keith in that other thread, if one cannot make such basic observations about less-good designs, because “we can’t know the designer’s intentions”, then we similarly cannot use this same common sense to judge ‘good’ designs. If creationists reject the Argument from Poor Design, they automatically reject the basis for their own design argument. But they won’t do that, so the Argument from Poor Design is still valid.

Cheers, DT

Jan Haugland

pz makes a good point that this observation does not violate "the creation theory," mostly because there isn't any.

However, creationists often feel free to make statements about what it would be reasonable to expect a Creator-God to do, and it's hard to see any intelligent designer put into the lion to kill other males' cubs and conclude "that is good."

- Jan

...who rants and raves every day at Secular Blasphemy

KC

Yes! I have always marvelled at the inconsistency there.

KC

Non-praying Mantis

Actually, there are thousands of species of bats. IIRC, there are more bat species than there are other mammalian species combined. So to say that there is "one kind" of flying mammal would be quite a stretch...

...although I wouldn't put it past a creationist. On one creationist website, I saw that he had categorized all insects into a single kind. Amazing, since there are nearly ONE BILLION SPECIES of them!!!

NPM

(one of the billion insect species)

Lobstrosity

Oh, I know there are a lot of bat species, but I bet you could naively group them under a few "kinds" if you wanted (seeing as how nebulously defined the word "kind" really is). You don't have remarkable macroscopic variation in bats. Specifically, all bats are of the order Chiroptera. The class Mammalia is comprised of many different orders (26, to be precise). Why is it that only one order is capable of flight? I don't know...bats prove that mammals can fly. I'm just wondering why God didn't exploit this ability by creating more large-scale variation in flying mammals. For example, the class Aves contains thirty different orders of birds.