Natures wonders: zombified animals (Introduction)

by dhw, Thursday, January 12, 2017, 12:30 (2870 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: …if we want to know how each of these extraordinary procedures came about, perhaps the “answer” is that the organisms worked things out for themselves.

DAVID: Your last sentence makes no sense. The triple system involving a starling bird, a pill bug and a parasite would require a committee meeting of the three to work.

dhw: You are confusing parasitism with symbiosis. The parasitical plagywhat’saname lives inside the starling, the pill bug eats it with the poop, the parasite zombifies the pill bug, the starling eats the pill bug, and the whole process starts all over again. There are no “committee meetings”. Only the parasite has to work out its “lifestyle”. In your other examples, this is done by the wasp, the fungus, the barnacle, and once more the wasp. In any case, what is your theory? That your God preprogrammed the first cells to pass on these processes, without which life could not continue in order to produce humans?

DAVID: I know how the three part system works. How did the parasite bug figure out how to zombify toe pill bug? I don't know and neither do you, but it had to happen all at once for the system to work. My theory is evolution creates complexity in forms and lifestyles leading to the most complex figure of all, humans.

There are no committee meetings of the three, and I have suggested that the parasite works out its own lifestyle. There is no doubt that evolution has created increasingly complex forms and lifestyles, and I agree that humans are the most complex in terms of their mental capacity. The dispute is over how the process works. I have asked if your explanation of this example is that God preprogrammed the first cells to pass on the zombification technique? If not, do you think your God intervened and gave the parasite personal instructions? If it is neither of these, please offer an alternative to my own explanation, that the parasite used its own possibly God-given intelligence to work the method out for itself.


Complete thread:

 RSS Feed of thread

powered by my little forum