Pixel42
Schrödinger's cat
I was lucky enough to hear David Attenborough speak at the Cheltenham Literature Festival recently. He enthralled and amused the audience with stories about his 50 years in TV, and finally came to his latest project, Life In The Undergrowth, which is about the insects and other creatures which live underground. A story he told prompted a later question from the audience about ID, and Attenborough's response concluded with the best one-sentence summary of why ID is not, and never could be, science that I have ever heard.
Here's the story: They found a species of ant which is fooled by a certain butterfly into caring for its larvae. The larvae give off a particular scent which is identical to the chemical scent of the ants' own larvae, so when they find one near their nest they assume it's one of theirs, take it in, feed it, clean it etc, until eventually a butterfly emerges. But that's not all: there's also a species of wasp which can somehow (they don't know how) detect that an ants nest contains one of these butterfly larvae and enters the nest. The ants attack it, but the wasp gives off another scent which causes the ants to turn on each other. Meanwhile the wasp implants its own egg into the butterfly larva and leaves. When they come back to their senses the ants then continue to care for the larva, but what eventually emerges is a wasp.
The question at the end was "do you think natural selection can account for the ant/butterfly/wasp story?" It was obvious what the questioner was getting at, and Attenborough answered the question very carefully. He said that natural selection was the only process he knew of that can account for it. That didn't mean that all the details of how this particular situation evolved were known, or even that some other as yet unidentified process might not also be at work. But there was a time, for instance, when the details of how mutations were passed on were not understood, then DNA was discovered and now it is. "The correct scientific response to something that is not understood must always be to look harder for the explanation, not give up and assume a supernatural cause".
It strikes me that final quote would be a good motto for JREF.
Here's the story: They found a species of ant which is fooled by a certain butterfly into caring for its larvae. The larvae give off a particular scent which is identical to the chemical scent of the ants' own larvae, so when they find one near their nest they assume it's one of theirs, take it in, feed it, clean it etc, until eventually a butterfly emerges. But that's not all: there's also a species of wasp which can somehow (they don't know how) detect that an ants nest contains one of these butterfly larvae and enters the nest. The ants attack it, but the wasp gives off another scent which causes the ants to turn on each other. Meanwhile the wasp implants its own egg into the butterfly larva and leaves. When they come back to their senses the ants then continue to care for the larva, but what eventually emerges is a wasp.
The question at the end was "do you think natural selection can account for the ant/butterfly/wasp story?" It was obvious what the questioner was getting at, and Attenborough answered the question very carefully. He said that natural selection was the only process he knew of that can account for it. That didn't mean that all the details of how this particular situation evolved were known, or even that some other as yet unidentified process might not also be at work. But there was a time, for instance, when the details of how mutations were passed on were not understood, then DNA was discovered and now it is. "The correct scientific response to something that is not understood must always be to look harder for the explanation, not give up and assume a supernatural cause".
It strikes me that final quote would be a good motto for JREF.
