Jun 8, 2006

Intelligent Design Spec

I have a friend who is a landscape architect. He's been in this area of Texas for at least 30 years.

The other day we were talking about the scam of pesticides and herbacides. They don't work. Pestacides are especially notorious for losing efficacy over time due to insect adaptation. Plus they are bad for humans. Yeah, I want to eat that tomato covered in 24D. Hand it over.

There are some folks who scoff at the notion that something other than random chance created the universe. I don't know why exactly this idea elicits so many negative reactions but the latest incarnation of creation science is "Intelligent Design" and I think it gets a pretty bad rap generally speaking.

My landscaper friend was explaining how the fire ants (brought to this part of the continent by "intelligent" humans) used to be susceptible to pesticide use. Now they are not. And they did so over the past 2 decades without developing resistence to Amdro. Amdro is a bait. The ants take the food to their queen, feed her poison and she dies.

Fire ants  typically care for  a single queen. If that queen dies, so dies the colony. The fireants here in Texas, to mitigate the effects of Amdro, have taken to caring for 2 and 3 queens. When a neighboring colony's queen dies, one of the queens is shared with the other.

This level of cooperation is unprecedented amongst the fire ant population. Man, being the highest intelligence in the universe, in its attempt to clean up a mess he made, has made the mess worse. One can find example after example of this sort of environmental disaster occurring through man's meddling.

Either man isn't nearly as intelligent as he believes, or most everything in the universe is more intelligent.

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