“Please Be My Toothpick You Scrumptious Old Wrasse!”
| August 4, 2009 | Posted by Robert Deyes under Intelligent Design |
Synopsis Of The Third Chapter Of Nature’s IQ By Balazs Hornyanszky and Istvan Tasi
ISBN 978-0-9817273-0-1
Mutualism and symbiosis are terms that budding biologists are all too familiar with by the time they begin their university careers. We all learn about the cooperativity that exists amongst many of our world’s creatures and the benefits they can reap from each other’s presence. Goliath groupers that open their mouths to cleaning ‘minions’ such as the blue-streak cleaner wrasse defy deeply held expectations of nature’s ways as do sharks that extend their vicious jaws to pilot fish that then pick out food remnants from between their teeth.
Extraordinary from a predatory perspective is the finding that wrasses and pilot fish are rarely (if ever) eaten by their much larger hosts. Discussions on the evolution of such partnerships leave the non-expert believing that chance mutations could simply turn predator ‘fearers’ into predator ‘lovers’ that naturally bond with their otherwise mortal enemies. Evolutionists weigh in by further supposing that reciprocal mutations led these same enemies to offer VIP treatments to their tasty servants.
Hornyanszky and Tasi nevertheless spare little in their decrial of the evolutionists’ hand-waving ideals. In their own un-minced words “it is nonsensical to suggest that, because of chance mutations, a small fish would suddenly approach a predator without inhibitions with the idea of getting food from its mouth…and that the former predator and prey would then propagate generations of fish that continued this symbiotic relationship” (p.47).
Symbiotic partnerships are of course hot favorites for television naturalists eager to spread their own vision of a world where faunal allegiances are mere products of an overarching process of evolutionary adaptation. No more so than for the Egyptian plover and the voracious Nile crocodile both of which have featured prominently in many a natural history documentary. The plover’s shrieking call, which signals the whereabouts of a potential meal, is an invaluable asset for the Nile crocodile as are the rich, bite-sized pickings on its own skin that supply the plover with its daily food rations.
Other partnerships can be vitally indispensable for the parties concerned. With its own cohort of formic acid-spraying weaver ants, the centaur oakblue caterpillar for example is dutifully protected from its enemies. Without them it would be hopelessly vulnerable. In turn the caterpillar supplies ants with a rich sweet milk, attracting them to its bounty through vibrations and special scents that they can quickly recognize.
Devotees of Pixar’s animated blockbuster Finding Nemo will no doubt tell of the symbiotic lifestyles that unite both the clownfish and the sea anemone. While the anemone’s stinging tentacles are of little consequence to the adult clownfish because of its protective gelatinous coat, the young unprotected fry relies on its instinctive ‘cautious first’ approach to avoid the deadly stings of its newly-found roommate.
And yet the seemingly intractable problem that Hornyanszky and Tasi repeatedly draw attention to in their own consideration of the facts is that of how the integrated cooperativity so visible in such partnerships gradually evolved. How might an ancestral anemone-dwelling clownfish have co-evolved the vitally important cautionary approach of its youth and the equally critical gelatinous covering of its older self? Any ‘half ready’ evolutionary intermediate would have suffered a prompt demise. And how might ancestral weaver ants have evolved a response to the caterpillar’s vibrations and scents as well as the ability to search for its milky secretions? As the authors’ duly note:
“The weaver ants would have no concept of [the caterpillar's] existence; therefore, they would take no notice of the scent and sound signals emitted by it. And if they had accidentally bumped into each other in the forest, the ants would have ruthlessly torn the novel caterpillar apart. Thus, we can hardly consider their relationship the result of an evolutionary process” (p.53)
A scrumptious wrasse picking inside the mouth of the Goliath grouper is the image that best epitomizes the attack on the Darwinian edifice that Hornyanszky and Tasi lay out in the third chapter of their book. And what a well-orchestrated attack it has turned out to be.
For more information and to order Nature’s IQ go to http://www.arn.org/arnproducts/php/book_show_item.php?id=129
41 Responses to “Please Be My Toothpick You Scrumptious Old Wrasse!”
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Scott,
I think he was trying to say…
Voila! Presto-Chango a random mutation created a new brain architecture simultaneously in both creatures allowing for convergent brain signal acceptance on part of predator and prey. And did so without harm or threat of life and genetic decline. Magical Oceanic Dental Hygenist.
Although, another explanation may be based on Darwin’s TOL where the ancestor is in fact the Wrasse that is recognized now by its descendent long lost sons, the Groupers.
Its kinda a father/son relationship of the ages. If you only imagine. Its easy if you try.
One can easily imagine in the past, the Grouper about to eat the Wrasse is suddenly mystified when one morning for brunch, hears a Wrasse Who, who, who and he recognizes it is his long lost father. Dad!
Don’t worry son, says the Wrasse, I may have left you long ago in the past, but today, I am here to clean your teeth. My, what big teeth you have son! You’ve grown so much! That’s my boooy. Take care of me son in my million year old age, and your teeth will shine! I’m a professionally trained underwater floss fish.
One can “easily imagine” these situations develop over long periods of time. The Wrasse and Grouper so happy with their new found family heritage spread the news to other fathers and sons.
Disney will make a movie soon.
Super Grouper, a fishchip off the old Wrasse-a-Flosse block.
I’m curious, when Ford designed and made the Model T, was there a mutual gas amoeba growing from the past into a gas station attendent?
Mutualism does not confer Darwinism.
But Design can handle mutualism very easily. One does not have to prove the designer exist to recognize the patterns of mutal dependency can be organized, indeed categorized and created simultaneously by a Designer. And it does not need to “poof” anymore than a car poofs today by GM, except for poofery economics, which is indeed magic welfare.
Quick follow-up.
Are cars and batteries and battery installers poofing today into existence by Designers?
Or, are there coordinated Design metrics worked out in advance planning stages for a new transportation future?
Same with Hydrogen, Natural Gas, etc, for car refueling networks.
Mutual beneficial Relationships by design over time – no problem. It is done every single day by intelligent agents.
Lenoxus
Thank you for your post. You wrote:
Even materialists would have to agree that there’s a reasonable likelihood that life on earth arose as a result of intelligent agency. Here’s why. The universe is 13.7 billion years old, and life on Earth is certainly no more than 4.4 billion years old. As far as we know, there’s nothing particularly exceptional about our Sun. Thus if we assume (for argument’s sake) that life arose naturally, then it probably arose on some other planet in the Milky Way galaxy long before it arose on Earth. If we also assume for argument’s sake that intelligent life is the product of natural processes, then once again, unless its evolution is fantastically improbable, it probably emerged somewhere else first. It would have been very easy for intelligent beings to send unmanned probes to explore the entire Milky Way, in a relatively short time span. They should have arrived on Earth long ago. These probes could have easily been seeded with microbes or alternatively, accidentally contaminated with microbes. Given that life emerged on Earth relatively late in the history of the cosmos, there’s a reasonable chance that life on Earth arrived from elsewhere.
We can figure this out, but this probabilistic argument tells us nothing about the modus operandi of the alien civilization that sent life here – if there was one. Thus we have an ID-friendly result, built on purely secular assumptions, which says nothing about mechanisms.
Here is something interesting:
http://www.sciencenews.org/vie.....crow_about
At this point, you’re technically not arguing that our existence is likely the result of those intelligent beings, just that it’s possible. The argument gives no reason to pick that over a scenario in which our own origins are as non-artificial as the aliens’. However, you could argue that any given intelligent civilization is likely to want to seed its neighborhood with life, which could make most biospheres in the universe the result of intelligent seeding by a few civilizations. But I don’t see too much strong evidence yet for such a claim.
But it tells us plenty. It tells us that the methods would have been physical, involving technology at least vaguely similar to our gene-splicing methods. Plus, there’s no reason not to expect some sort of “footprint” left by the aliens. (Indeed, plenty have argued for such footprints in the form of ancient human art supposedly depicting ETs, but there has yet to be evidence pushing things beyond the reasonable doubt that, for example, the “space helmets” of ancient gods are really halos.)
In any case, ID is pretty clearly not about aliens — the ETs only seem to come in as a rhetorical point to rope in naturalists. The meat of things, mechanism-wise, is still in the insistence that materialism is insufficient for biology. So I think my earlier point still stands — the designer can do whatever it wants, not only physically but motivationally. Even Behe’s argument that demonstrating evolutionary pathways would rule out design is insufficient — who’s to say that the designer isn’t behind each and every mutation ever seen in Earth’s history?
Lenoxus:
You have reconstructed the point to fit your own preconceptions.
Design theory — as it has long been defined — is about inference to design on empirically credible signs of intelligence. The point of putting up a logically possible alternative for life on earth is that it shows that there are various possible candidates; aka suspects.
One shows that there was arson or murder FIRST, then one looks at likely suspects and finds further evidence to rule in/out.
But, your controlling ideological metanarrative seems to be that ID is “creationism in a cheap tuxedo,” as can be seen form your remark:
kindly look at he correctives above on that slur.
When it comes to your:
You have again created a strawman. the issue is not “biology” but functionally specific, complex information, which is commonly observed as to occurence and as to origin. In every known case, it traces to intelligence. tha tis we have an inference to known explanation here.
Further tot his, we see that biological cells have in them code based, algorithm implementing digital information systems that go well beyond the threshold of 1,000 bits where the whole universe as we observe it acting as a search engine would be incapable of scanning 1 in 10^150th part of the possible configurations. So, islands of function (i.e. function is specific to a cluster of codes and mutually adjusted executing machines) will be maximally unlikely to be found by blind search. But, intelligences routinely produce such systems, e.g. posts in this thread.
In short, we have on inference to best explanation, that intelligence is the best candidate for the information systems in life.
And, when we look at materialism itself, it runs into all sorts of trouble as a philosophical system of thought. just, it happens to be institutionally ideologically dominant in power centres of science and the wider culture, a hang-over from the history of C19 and C20.
But, a simple glance at Lewontin’s 1997 NYRB article wil tell us what is really going on:
A priori censorship that blocks science from inferring to empirically well warranted causal factors in short.
That’s not good enough.
GEM of TKI
kairosfocus:
I hear this a lot and still don’t quite get it. Do you really need the OK of the biological community before you can start to talk about the nature of the designer?
I certainly don’t think ID is creationism in any but the remotest sense. I believe in referring to groups by their own terms for themselves, or the nearest I can come to that without feeling dishonest. I would call ID a metaphysical research program
.
When I refer to the “insistence that materialism is insufficient”, I’m talking about what I’ve gleaned from this blog, which I see as representative of ID. Many of its entries have specifically discussed limits of materialism. I used the word “biology” as a shorthand for “aspects of biology”, including complex structures.
Oh, Lewontin, destined to be forever quoted… well, he’s not my idol, and in fact, I completely disagree with him. If I see a divine foot nudging its way in, or a divine finger hitting the doorbell, I will happily open the door all the way.
The problem is that the first part of that doesn’t seem to have happened. The divinity seems to be being dragged in, not coming in on the basis of its own positive physical evidence. That quote keeps getting used to demonstrate that “prior adherence” is the only thing stopping science from incorporating supernaturalism (yes, I will keep using that word, because that is by definition what is beyond the natural). I think that lack of evidence is part of it too.
In any case, come to think of it, I doubt that Lewontin was actually thinking of what scientists should do if divinity unequivocally appears to them — he was more likely talking about avoiding a god of the gaps.
Oh, and where did that “divinity” come from, kairosfocus? I could have sworn that you insisted that ID was not anti-naturalistic? So confused…
All that said, I truly don’t believe that anything you’re expressing here is a result of ulterior motives, but an earnest conclusion from the data. Much love!
Mr vjtorley,
Or course, it is not quite as easy as subtracting 4 from 13. Arguing for space aliens requires more than SETI. You need a spacefaring civilisation that litters.
But that doesn’t solve the regression of the problem to how the aliens came to be, though it does make timeframe more difficult for their creation.
Lenoxus:
A few follow up notes:
1 –> Again, unless one has good reason to infer that a fire was credibly designed, one does not go looking for an arsonist. that is, inference to the credibility of destgn is antecedent to attempted detection of candidates.
2 –> Mr Lewontin is a member of the US National Academy of Sciences, and his view is seen to be implemented by that new Magisterium, cf here. (The result is holding the children of a state hostage to enforce a priori materialism, L; is THAT what you want to enable?)
3 –> Design theory is not primarily philosophy, more than that any research programme has to address phil elements, per Lakatos. It is about identifying and inferring from empirically reliable signs of design, formalising what is actually routine in a great many fields of science, now multiplied by bringing together implicaitons of a chain of results on chaos, complexity, self-ordering etc; cf the current review paper by Abel.
4 –> Lewontin went on to say: >> Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door. The eminent Kant scholar Lewis Beck used to say that anyone who could believe in God could believe in anything. To appeal to an omnipotent deity is to allow that at any moment the regularities of nature may be ruptured, that miracles may happen. >>.
5 –> This reflects his profound ignorance of the subject, as for instance, for a miracle to be recognisable we need an orderly cosmos; likewise if we are to be morally accountable, we need reliable cause-effect bonds. And, historically, that is the frame of reference in which science in its modern form was born.
6 –> I note as well that Lewontin was not hesitant at all, as was just again cited: he imposed a priopri marterialism, full stop; in the name of defending the orderly cosmos from the imagined — sky is falling — chaos of an intervening God. (Just look at what he actually said as opposed to what you would like to defend rhetorically.)
7 –> That is, the real issue is that methodological naturalism so-called is in reality implicit imposition of a priori philosophical materialism without having to address the consequences of that on a proper comparative difficulties basis across worldviews. (Wonderful how effective a little materialism-serving creative re-writing of history is! [Contrast Newton in his General Scholium as just one key example.)
8 --> In this context, naturalism is more or less synonymous with materialism. The design view is opposed to the imposition of materialism as an a priori [as should be anyone concerned for allowing science to be unfettered].
GEM of TKI
But you do believe you have good reason for the inference — so why no arsonist? Or do you mean that it’s best to credit the fire to the universe’s fundamental principle of Arson?
I’m pretty sure that no one treats Lewontin as infallible. Furthermore, I imagine that if anyone, adult or child, experiences a supernatural miracle (in the presence of witnesses etc), they’re not going to say, “Ah, but His Lewontinness said not to allow any Divine Feet in, so I’d better keep my mouth shut!” In any case, of course I don’t believe in conditioning children to be athiests or materialists, even if Lewontin… does…?
But in a wholly orderly cosmos, miracles follow a predictable pattern, and therefore aren’t miracles. I don’t see much of a middle ground between a universe without an intervening god and the “chaos” you refer to later on. (Even a mild chaos is still chaos.) Fortunately, ID doesn’t require miracles, because maybe it’s the case that the designer does follow a specific, predictable pattern in its behavior, just as humans often do. Predictably unpredictable, so to speak.
All that said, it is an interesting and important point that miracles can only happen in an otherwise ordered universe.
That is pretty much what I meant earlier. Lewontin and I agree that we shouldn’t resort to a God who can fill each and every gap. However, a god for which there is positive physical evidence anyway must be let into the door, whatever Lewontin has to say about it. I think he’s implicitly assuming that we’re talking about a divine foot that lacks such evidence, and is therefore being brought in only to explain the shortcomings of current naturalistic theories.