Natures wonders: ant rafts and towers (Introduction)

by dhw, Tuesday, July 18, 2017, 08:43 (2683 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: It does indeed make complete sense. What doesn’t make sense is the idea that these organisms don’t know what they’re doing (“instinctual behaviour”…”not one giant brain”). How did these marvellous feats of engineering originate? Do you think your God gave the first raft/tower builders personal lessons, or preprogrammed the first cells to pass on instructions to the first ants a few thousand million years later? I suggest that cooperating ants provide an analogy to cooperating cells: by pooling their intelligence they devise solutions which they would be incapable of finding on their own. The colony may not BE one giant brain, but the product of their cooperation is the same as that of a giant brain, and the brain itself is also a mass of cooperating individual units. Over and over again your natural wonders demonstrate the intelligent, inventive behaviour of the respective organisms, but you can never bring yourself to accept that this might have ORIGINATED through their own inventive (perhaps God-given) intelligence.

DAVID: The study is quite clear, but not to you. The authors specifically state each ant does its own thing. It can carry just so much weight, and responds accordingly. Your analogy is the usual stretch. They build nests by instinct. the rafts and towers are not that. Individual cells are complex factories, operating automatically following intelligent instructions thy have been given.

Individual ants are communities of cells and are also complex factories, and their astonishing architectural achievements can only be the product of intelligence. You have not responded to my question whether you think your God preprogrammed the first raft/tower-building ants or gave them lessons. I accept that in many cases cells operate automatically following instructions they have been given, but I am suggesting that those instructions come from the (possibly God-given) intelligence of the cell communities themselves - just like the instructions for raft and tower-building coming from the intelligence of the ant community - and not from a divine 3.8 billion-year-old computer programme for every natural wonder in the history of life, or from your God giving private lessons.