Newly-discovered tree-dwelling shrimp
Credit: Expedition Cyclops.
In my last blog post, I wrote about a successful expedition to the Cyclops Mountains on the north coast of Indonesian New Guinea to look for the rare Attenborough's long-beaked echidna, Zaglossus attenboroughi and mentioned almost in passing that the team of scientists discovered, amongst lots of insects and other arthropods previously unknown to science, a shrimp that lives in the trees in the tropical rain forest that covers the remote mountains.
I'll repeat that! They discovered a species of shrimp that lives in the trees!
If anything, this is even more ludicrous than the fish and plants that creationists must believe were designed to live in deserts that are notoriously short of water.
Shrimps are not noted for their arboreal agility, nor for their ability to live for more than a few minutes out of water for that matter, but, if you're a creationist who believes all living things are created by an invisible magic creator, you have to believe that this creator either looked at trees in the Cyclops Mountains and concluded that they could be improved by having shrimps living in them, or, feeling a need to create another shrimp, decided the best place to put it was in the trees in a tropical rain forest in New Guinea.
Of course, it's nonsense!
No designer, intelligent or otherwise, worthy of the label 'designer', would come up with something so bizarre as a tree shrimp, and then go to the lengths needed to design if for such an unlikely environment.
But evolution by natural selection, being mindless and working without a plan by simply holding on to that which works better than previously, is quite capable of ‘designing’ such a bizarre creature. The local environment is so wet that living out of water would actually be difficult, so a shrimp could easily move out onto water-logged land if that gave it access to more food or safety from predators. If crawling up a wet tree trunk then gave it access to yet more food, then that environmental sector would push the shrimps’ evolution in that direction - and eventually we have a tree shrimp.
Now, being new to science, we have little information about this shrimp's breeding habits. Does it breed in trees or soil, or does it return to the water? The answer to those questions is awaited and will be revealed by science in due course, but one thing we can be sure of is that it produces shrimps that can climb trees.
The thing is design is a top-down process where the designer starts with an idea - in this case a rainforest - and designs something to live in it. It would take a fruitloop to think the best thing to design to live in a rainforest would be an aquatic shrimp! And, because, as humans who make things, we can readily see the stupidity of any designer who came up with the tree shrimp, we instinctively know it couldn't have been intelligently designed.
It takes a special sort of human whose childhood brainwashing has been so complete that they really can't see the stupidity there, and satisfy themselves with daft platitudes like, "God's plans are unknowable!", "It's not for mere humans to try to understand God!", "God had a reason to create tree shrimps in New Guinea, but we can never know what it was!" and at the same time feeling that they are currying favours from their god by humbling themselves before it. But, pretending to know the answers without examining the evidence is not humility; it's self-idolatry.
Faith is pretending to know things you don't know!
The Cyclops mountains as seen from the Pacific Ocean.
Credit: Expedition Cyclops.
Then having evolved the ability to live out of the water, if moving up the trees gives them an advantage, then more and more shrimps will take to the trees. It didn't happen overnight, and no magic was required. Slowly, over time, a species of shrimp in the coastal waters of northern New Guinea evolved into a tree shrimp in the rain forest of the Cyclops Mountains. If the climate changes and the rain stops, or the trees disappear, they will go extinct.
The result is a tree shrimp.
The amazing thing is that there are still humans, a supposedly sentient species that makes things, who can't understand the simple logic of the evolutionary process - which is itself an even more bizarre proposition than a designer designing tree shrimps - so there must be a logical explanation for this apparent deficit in the thinking department.
The answer is fear. Creationists are inculcated from birth to believe the childish teleological explanation for the appearance of design and also that the putative designer has an especially nasty punishment awaiting those who show the slightest doubt, so they won't permit themselves to think logically for fear of the consequences. The reward for this abject abandonment of intellectual integrity is the delusion of feeling more important than they really are because an imaginary designer made the universe especially with them in mind and holds them in special regard.
Sadly, that combination or morbid theophobic psychosis and delusion of grandeur prevents them from the joy of discovery and the appreciation of the real 'magic' of reality, like discovering how a shrimp can come to live in trees in New Guinea.
The Unintelligent Designer: Refuting The Intelligent Design Hoax
ID is not a problem for science; rather science is a problem for ID. This book shows why. It exposes the fallacy of Intelligent Design by showing that, when examined in detail, biological systems are anything but intelligently designed. They show no signs of a plan and are quite ludicrously complex for whatever can be described as a purpose. The Intelligent Design movement relies on almost total ignorance of biological science and seemingly limitless credulity in its target marks. Its only real appeal appears to be to those who find science too difficult or too much trouble to learn yet want their opinions to be regarded as at least as important as those of scientists and experts in their fields.
Available in Hardcover, Paperback or ebook for Kindle
The Malevolent Designer: Why Nature's God is Not Good
This book presents the reader with multiple examples of why, even if we accept Creationism's putative intelligent designer, any such entity can only be regarded as malevolent, designing ever-more ingenious ways to make life difficult for living things, including humans, for no other reason than the sheer pleasure of doing so. This putative creator has also given other creatures much better things like immune systems, eyesight and ability to regenerate limbs that it could have given to all its creation, including humans, but chose not to. This book will leave creationists with the dilemma of explaining why evolution by natural selection is the only plausible explanation for so many nasty little parasites that doesn't leave their creator looking like an ingenious, sadistic, misanthropic, malevolence finding ever more ways to increase pain and suffering in the world, and not the omnibenevolent, maximally good god that Creationists of all Abrahamic religions believe created everything. As with a previous book by this author, "The Unintelligent Designer: Refuting the Intelligent Design Hoax", this book comprehensively refutes any notion of intelligent design by anything resembling a loving, intelligent and maximally good god. Such evil could not exist in a universe created by such a god. Evil exists, therefore a maximally good, all-knowing, all-loving god does not.
Illustrated by Catherine Webber-Hounslow.
Available in Hardcover, Paperback or ebook for Kindle
Illustrated by Catherine Webber-Hounslow.
Why create shrimps that can live in trees? Is this something that's really needed? The only benefit I can see for this is that these shrimp can provide food for predators in the trees. Otherwise it's really a stupid, useless creation. The creator has the ability to create tree living shrimp but He doesn't have the ability to heal His creation from cancer and other horrible diseases. Does this creator ever do anything that makes sense? Why can't this creator give us a cure for cancer and other diseases? Why can't this creator do something intelligent and beneficial for His creation? Creating shrimps in trees is neither intelligent nor is it beneficial.
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