Blue Collar Scientist

S. Walker at Inconcinnus Sermo has posted some excellent observations about intelligent design creationism and organism behavior.

Has anyone ever wondered why intelligent design never really talks about anything but complexity and molecules or just complain about all the ‘holes’ in evolution (NOT)?

Walker continues:

How about infanticide? How would intelligent design explain infanticide? This would be a real test of the ID paradigm.

Indeed. Does intelligent design creationism predict and explain infanticide?

Evolutionary theory does. Here in Alaska, any brown bear sow with a cub will go to considerable trouble to avoid interaction with a male, because the male will frequently attempt to kill the cub. It makes sense that the bear would do this - the chances of a particular cub being his offspring are very small, so eliminating a cub almost always eliminates the genes of a competing male. It also makes the sow sexually receptive more quickly, thus increasing the male’s chances of mating. By this means males who commit infanticide make their genes more frequent in the population. In other words, in this case, the genes that make infanticidal bears perpetuate themselves in the gene pool.

What about infanticide in humans? There are many cultures in which people committed infanticide under various circumstances. Some cultures set deformed children out of doors to die by exposure. While not morally defensible in our culture, in a society in which resources are scarce, doing this makes a certain amount of perverse sense - you want to expend what little in the way of crops that you have on children who are healthy and vigorous. Evolutionary theory predicts that those parents who expend the least on children of low fitness will better perpetuate their genes. Just because a baby is lost this year, doesn’t mean you can’t try again next year, or the year after, when crops are good.

In addition to these well known forms of infanticide, other cultures have committed infanticide for other reasons. The ancient Israelites killed¹ all of the children of the city Ai in a military assault. In a society based on genetic relationships², killing all the inhabitants of a city you wish to take by force means that your clan can avoid competition with the remnant of a competing clan. By eliminating the children, they eliminate long-term resentment that can work against them in the future. But it also eliminates the conquereds’ genes. Evolutionary theory shows that what at first might seem to be merely a political policy also has a genetic effect: genes that influence people to kill “enemy” children - if any - will have an advantage over the genes of peaceful people - they will, on average, be slaughtered by the former, not vice-versa.

While evolutionary theory explains this brutality, it also suggests a solution to the problem. Knowing that the natural process of evolution encourages some nasty behaviors in our fellow man is a powerful realization. While very few people condemn competition, virtually everyone believes competition should be fair. It is pretty obvious that in the genetic lotteries, killing helpless children is an unfair tactic - you reap a big genetic reward with little cost and little risk³. Without evolutionary theory, we wouldn’t have this insight - the only thing standing in the way of people killing their neighbor’s babies would be a vague distaste over the noise, or perhaps the mess. There’d be an emotional reluctance, perhaps - but we wouldn’t have any knowledge about why such a thing is wrong.

Evolutionary theory also suggests ways that society can respond to this bloodthirstiness and suppress the killing of children. One potential way to do that is to found a religion in which an all-powerful sky god condemns the killing. Unfortunately, the god of the most popular religion in the United States is depicted as being pro-infanticide⁴. I guess that explains why this idea hasn’t worked out.

Obligatory good art: Giotto’s Massacre of the Innocents.

Another way is to create a government that (1) protects each of the society’s productive members right to exist, and (2) allows them to make effective decisions about when to reproduce. There’s a potential evolutionary advantage to leveling the genetic playing field in this manner. By ostracizing and penalizing child-killers, their genes will be less perpetuated in your society’s gene pool. As a result, your gene pool should be more diverse, rather than dominated by genes influencing infanticide, thus possibly making the species more survivable in the face of changing environmental conditions.

And by giving adults the means to prevent reproduction, the genetic competition is played out in terms of strategy, instead of violence and force. Those who are best at determining when to reproduce, and how many times, prevail in the genetic lotteries. To the extent that genes determine good decision making, this is a recipe for evolving a smarter society.

So much for the beneficial insights of evolutionary theory. Let’s leave aside the peaceful morality that proceeds from evolution, and explore what intelligent design has to say on the issue.

I started with a Google search, and I was disappointed to find that Walker is correct when he says that intelligent design creationism is silent on the issue. I found nothing from an intelligent design creationist on the web⁵ that said anything about intelligent design creationism’s views on infanticide.

That leaves us to explore the issues for ourselves. As Walker notes:

What characteristics of the unknown designer might we infer from infanticide? … [T]he issue here is that ID as a theory is doomed unless something is known about the designer and that information can be used to generate hypotheses about the real world.

That’s a real problem, because intelligent design creationists frequently refuse to say who or what the creator/designer is. But we can obviously go the other direction here. Infanticide is widespread, not only among people, but also in nature. This is observed fact. Given this, what does it say about the designer/creator?

What it necessarily must say is that the designer/creator found nothing wrong with killing children and helpless young animals. Otherwise, this capability would not have been built into creation. Even if we accept the rather ad-hoc and evidence-lacking assertion that “the fall” corrupted creation and infanticide did not exist prior to then, organisms could not be physically capable of infanticide if the tools for it had not been built into life in the first place.

Intelligent design creationists say that biological structures are intelligently designed to fulfill their functions. If so, that means that the biological structures that animals use to kill babies were intelligently designed for the purpose of killing babies.

Furthermore, infanticide is practiced by organisms that are incredibly diverse. Even plants do it. Bacteria do it. Lobsters do it. The list is incredibly long, and as far as I can tell every class of organism does it. That suggests that not only does the designer/creator condone infanticide, but that he’s positively enthusiastic about it.

This picture of the creator/designer is not, I would suggest, the kind of supernatural power or little green alien that my readers would enjoy hanging out with.

Of course, science is all about finding out what is true, and not about gathering support for what you want to be true. So all we need to do is look at the evidence. Evolutionary theory makes several predictions and provides powerful explanations for what we observe in the biological world - including infanticide. It is so successful at this that it it responsible for originating or explaining - or both - all of our knowledge of biology. Every day, more scientific studies about evolution are conducted, and every day, all of them show that evolution is sound.

Meanwhile, intelligent design creationism? It explains nothing. Even infanticide, which it explains, presumably, by hypothesizing a bloodthirsty infanticide-loving designer/creator, is better explained by evolutionary theory. But it goes beyond this. An intelligent design creationism that explains infanticide with a designer/creator that approves of violence against children cannot cope with the simultaneous presence of altruism in organisms - while evolutionary theory does.

Not only does science better explain what we know about infanticide, in a modern civilization evolutionary theory shows us how the problem it represents can be solved. Meanwhile the primary accomplishment of intelligent design creationism has been to demand that the government subsidize the teaching of its nonsense by raising taxes on the populace so stickers can be placed in texbooks and teachers can be forced to offer religious indoctrination in science class.

1. If we believe the account in the bible, in Joshua chapter 8. [↩]
2. Which is how the bible describes the ancient Israelites. [↩]
3. Babies aren’t really known for defending themselves successfully against the assaults of adults. [↩]
4. In Joshua 8, god is said to not only have approved of, but to have planned, the killing of the children of Ai. In 1 Samuel 15:3, god commands the slaughter of infants. Psalms 135:8 & 136:10, god is praised for killing babies. Psalms 137:9, god commands babies be dashed against the rocks. Exodus 12:29, god plans and carries out the killing of the oldest child of every family in an entire country. Etc. [↩]
5. After looking at a few pages of search results. [↩]

I guess it is stale story day. Having just discussed a three week old astronomy story, now we’re going to look at a week-old news story that apparently just hit the US. By way of the Tracker, I’ve learned that every single blue-eyed person on the planet shares a common ancestor who lived just 6,000 to 10,000 years ago.

The press release has some of the details, but it boils down to this. Blue eyes may have appeared in humans a number of times, but the first time that someone with blue eyes stuck around and had enough children to perpetuate the gene across the globe was 6 kya to 10 kya. The blue eyes were the result of a mutation in a gene called OCA2. As the principal investigator puts it, all blue-eyed people

“have all inherited the same switch at exactly the same spot in their DNA.”

What is the meaning of the mutation?

The mutation of brown eyes to blue represents neither a positive nor a negative mutation. It is one of several mutations such as hair colour, baldness, freckles and beauty spots, which neither increases nor reduces a human’s chance of survival. As Professor Eiberg says, “it simply shows that nature is constantly shuffling the human genome, creating a genetic cocktail of human chromosomes and trying out different changes as it does so.”

This is evolution in action. Evolution isn’t trying to make a better creature, it is just making the next generation different from the previous one. In the original blue-eyed person’s case, they were different in that they had a unique eye color. But their descendants inherited their version of the gene and this variation spread through a fairly significant proportion of the population.

As the PI notes, the change was neither bad nor good, on average. Anecdotally, I’ve observed that my blue-eyed friends tend to have a tougher time with eye fatigue on glaciers, snowshoeing, or cross country skiing, than I do (the BCS is brown eyed). This may or may not be significant, but if it is significant, there is certainly plenty of evidence that blue eyes are subject to sexual selection in the culture in which I live - so that would be a benefit to the blue-eyed crowd. If there’s any downside, it’s offset by an upside, but the PI is probably right - this mutation is neither good nor bad.

There’s a more fundamental issue here, though. The change in gene OCA2 is referred to pretty universally as a mutation. That means blue-eyed people are mutants.

Expect the playground taunts to commence forthwith. :-)

Of course this is true - blue-eyed people are mutants. But so is everyone else. We are all a collection of mutations, some of them good, some of them bad, some of them neutral when it comes to engaging with the world around us. Every gene that we don’t share in common with chimpanzees, and every gene they don’t share in common with us, is proof of the bundle of mutations we’re made with. And you can take that right down the line to each of our ancestors back to the beginning of life - the degree to which we differ from a starfish is the degree to which both we, and starfish, are mutants.

I know some creationists who would strenuously object to being called a mutant. They believe they were made by god, and that god made them perfectly, and that god on purpose introduced any perceived flaws in their construction. Calling someone a mutant radically undermines this perception, and if you bandy this idea about, you’ll get push back from them. Mutants are, in their perception, abominations - things that represent an active fight against god and his supposed desires.

It is yet another illustration that the language we¹ use is completely different from that of creationists. I suppose it goes beyond language, and in fact indicates a completely different reality that we live in. But our reality is, I think, better. A world in which “mutant” is understood to refer to someone who has some sort of small chemical difference in some molecules in their body works for me. A world in which a mutant refers to someone debased, whose very existence flaunts an inner hostility to some supposed king of the universe - that world sucks. And that world is with us today - some of our religions require that we kill those who oppose god - and as I’m sure many of us have noticed, plenty of the religious are willing to do just that. Just my opinion, here, but a world in which I have the freedom to look at a blond, leggy, blue-eyed mutant and see a person of beauty is a much better world than one in which “deformed” babies are abandoned by their parents in the outdoors to die of exposure. To put it into modern terms, if a red-eyed baby were born today, I’d much rather the collective reaction of society be along the lines of “cool!” and “radical!” instead of killing the baby as demon-spawn.

And to be a blue-eyed person, and to know that your blue eyes came to you from an ancestor who lived possibly as recently as 6,000 years ago - what a great sense of connection to humanity, and our collective historical experience, that must give someone.

Blue eyed people are mutants. And looking at this from a scientific perspective allows us to see this as something beautiful, something interesting, something worthy of passion, and something that makes our lives rich and worth living.

It must really suck to be a creationist.

1. i.e., science types [↩]