Natures wonders: ant rafts and towers (Introduction)

by dhw, Saturday, July 22, 2017, 10:05 (2679 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: I see ants building structures (rafts, towers, nests) which seem to me to require intelligence. I propose that individual ants cooperated intelligently as a community to design these structures. The authors propose that they build them “automatically”. You presumably propose that God gave them instructions. All of us extrapolate our conclusions from “what the data might mean”. None of us can prove our proposals.

DAVID: I did not presume God gave them instructions for rafts or towers. Again, your overreach.

dhw: Apologies for the misunderstanding, but in that case I can only assume you agree with me that the ORIGINAL rafts and towers were the product of ant intelligence, so what are we disagreeing about?

DAVID: My objection originally was to your interpretation denying the author's results that individual ants acted automatically. I still agree with their interpretation, God not needed.

I am, of course, delighted that you do not think your God was needed to design these extraordinary feats of engineering, but bearing in mind that there must have been a first raft and a first tower, I don’t understand what you or the authors mean by “automatically”. Do you really think those first raft and tower builders didn’t know what they were doing?