Natures wonders: ant rafts and towers (Introduction)

by dhw, Sunday, July 23, 2017, 09:23 (2678 days ago) @ David Turell

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.

dhw: 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?

DAVID: Each individual ant knew what he was naturally doing, the point of the article, resulting in the group acting together.

One would not expect any organisms (other than humans!) to act unnaturally, and one would expect social organisms to act together. I don’t see that as meaning that the ants act “automatically” as opposed to intelligently. You constantly point to complexity as evidence of intelligent design. Ant rafts and towers are complex feats of engineering, and so if your God was not needed, they are clear evidence of ant intelligence.