Articles
A
Big Blue Blunder
By Karl Priest (10-21-08)
Jack
Woodall is the director of the Nucleus for the Investigation of
Emerging Infectious Diseases in the Institute of Medical Biochemistry
at Brazil's Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. He is undoubtedly
an intelligent and educated man. Yet, in an essay entitled “Intelligent
Design: The Clincher. A Butterfly Explodes the Theory”* he
provides a prime example of evolutionist ignorance.
All hope of
credibility is lost in the first paragraph when, in describing the
butterfly life-cycle, Woodall credits a chrysalis with redesigning
its body. (1) In his second paragraph he cancels the premise of his
article by affirming that a seemingly poor design can actually be
“a very efficient system.” (2) Then, to further reveal
the anemic arsenal available to true believers in evolutionism,
he tries to claim the Large Blue butterfly was not intelligently
designed because he (Mr. Woodall) would not have designed it to
function as it does. (3)
Mr.
Woodall must have some intellectual issues. First of all—what
he would do in personally designing a butterfly is a ridiculous
point. When he can bring a butterfly to life, I will be inclined
to listen to his ideas about how he would design it to successfully
survive. Secondly, Woodall seems to have missed the obvious fact
that the Large Blue has survived just fine for thousands (in his
case—millions) of years.
The
Big Blue may go extinct just as millions of other animals have done.
Extinction is devolution and devolution is science.
Mr.
Woodall made a big blue blunder with his pathetic attempt to discredit
Intelligent Design theory.
(1) At first sight, nothing could seem less intelligent than the
design of a flying insect. From an egg laid in or on a food supply,
it hatches into a slow-moving eating machine that keeps outgrowing
its skin, so that it has to molt every few days. At the moment of
molting, it is extremely vulnerable to predators and parasites.
Then, inexplicably, it stops moving and grows a hard shell, inside
which it completely redesigns its body from square one, to emerge
into a thing with wings that launches itself into hundreds of cubic
miles of atmosphere in search of a mate, and a food plant, with
nothing to guide it but a few stray molecules - pheromones and plant
odors - blowing in the wind.
(2)
The fact is, however, that this is a very efficient system for spreading
the genes of that species around the landscape, and for locating
food plants that would take an Earth-bound caterpillar days to find
by dint of much hard crawling.
OK, that complicated life cycle seems an intelligent creation in
the end. But what can we make of the further complications that
led the Large Blue butterfly (Maculinea arion) to extinction in
Britain?
(3)
So here you have an insect that depends for its very existence on
a fragile chain of circumstances that is easily broken by bad weather,
changes in exposure to grazing due to human intervention and disease,
loss of its unique food plant, and loss of its protector ant species.
If I were to design such a silly system I'd at least choose the
most abundant, hardy species of ant to host my caterpillars, and
ensure that they could feed on other plants beside thyme, and at
other stages than the bud. To me, the case of the Large Blue is
conclusive disproof of the theory of intelligent design.
*http://richarddawkins.net/articleComments,390,Intelligent-Design-The-Clincher-A-butterfly-explodes-the-theory,Jack-Woodall,page1#11647
and http://www.the-scientist.com/2006/12/1/53/1/
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