Another Brilliant Idea By The Intelligent Designer

You can say one thing about The Intelligent Designer - it doesn't let liberal sentimentality, compassion or morality get in the way of a good idea. In fact, it's almost exactly like The Intelligent Designer doesn't have any emotions or compassion, nor any idea of right and wrong.

I'll take that back. There is no 'almost' about it. It's exactly like The Intelligent Designer doesn't have any emotions, compassion or sense of right and wrong. It's exactly like The Intelligent Designer doesn't have any intelligent plan or any real purpose for its designs either.

In fact, let's face facts here, it's exactly like there isn't a designer, let alone an intelligent one.

Take the example of the genus of ground beetles known to science as Epomis. These beetles, both adult and lava, feed on amphibians like frogs, toads and newts, and they have a very special way of catching them. Their method is known to science as 'role reversal predation'.

Of course, Epomis beetles have to eat something, as do frogs and toads, but for sheer heartless barbarity, Epomis takes some beating. It uses itself as the bait and tricks its victim into thinking they have a nice meal sitting there just waiting to be eaten, then they grab hold with special double-hooked mandibles and proceed to slowly eat the would-be predator alive.

You might think this is a dangerous game carrying a high risk of failure and ending up as the meal they were pretending to be. However, the lava has another little trick up its sleeve. It causes the frog to regurgitate it then calmly grabs hold of the frog's face and begins munching away, none the worse for having spent some time inside it.

Wow! What a brilliant design, eh?

Well, a brilliant design until you take into account the fact that the creationists who came up with the 'Intelligent Design' notion insist that there is only one intelligent designer because their favourite book of origin myths says so. If we accept their notion for argument's sake, that same designer also designed the frog that fell for the trick and suffered a nasty slow death. So, what might appear from the beetle's point of view to be a rather clever designer who wants the best for its creation, from the frog's point of view is a rather stupid or malevolent designer who either hates the frogs it designed or it designed them for the fun of watching them being tricked into suffering a rather nasty slow death. The fact that Epomis beetles have managed to reverse this prey role to become the predator is incidental in this, though it brings into stark relief the uncaring amorality of the whole thing.

Peregrine falcon hunting pigeon

We can see these paradoxes in any predator-prey relationship, whether cheetah vs antelope, spider vs fly, buzzard vs rabbit or human vs chicken. Seen from the predator's point of view, everything seems like it was designed for the predator while from the prey point of view, the world is a rather nasty place, full of threats and evil. As the act of a single designer, it appears to be neither intelligent nor compassionate. It is either uncaring or positively evil, taking a perverse delight in watching life and death struggles with no regard for any suffering involved. But what when, as in the case of the frogs in these videos, the predator becomes the prey? Had it been the lava of a fly, or maybe an earthworm, no doubt a creationist would see only the 'intelligence' in frog design that helps it identify and catch its meal. How then does the character of the designer change when the role of predator becomes that of prey?

Thus, by any reasonable standard, Young Earth Creationism has reached a point of intellectual bankruptcy, both in its science and in its theology. Its persistence is thus one of the great puzzles and great tragedies of our time.

Francis Collins. The Language of God

Incidentally, scientists think this tactic in Epomis evolved from a defensive reaction when they would have simply bitten the frog to make it let go. The double-hooked mandible which might well have been used to hold onto smaller prey allowed them to cling onto the frog, and of course frogs don't have teeth so they swallow their prey relatively undamaged and, in the case of Epomis, armed with jaws capable of inflicting damage from the inside.

There is, of course, no compassion or morality in an evolutionary process which simply produces more descendants if the genes convey a significant advantage over other alleles of the same genes. Unlike the creationists, who try to force-fit reality into a model which puts them in a special relationship with their assumed creator of the Universe so that they feel suitably important, and so have to pretend that everything has a purpose which somehow relates to them and their existence, evolutionary biologists don't need to try to fit notions of morality, ultimate purpose or compassion into the scientific explanation of species and how they behave. The scientific theory predicts that human emotions such as compassion will play no part in the process because there is no mind, quasi-human or otherwise, behind it.

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