According to evolution, this butterfly evolved the owl's face to protect itself from predators. After all, owls scare away birds and other critters, don't they? Owls kill and eat those birds and other critters, don't they? So, here we have a non-intelligent animal - a butterfly - doing a pro-active act of copying the face of another predatory animal so the butterfly would not be killed and eaten. Having an owl's face evolve by itself on a butterfly without a demonstrated need for it - a need involving intelligence - just doesn't make much sense. But we will get the non-God excuses from Scienceland all the time, won't we?
Either the butterfly had to have the intelligence needed to realize that owls kill butterfly predators, or something with intelligence created the butterfly. And if science says there is no such thing as an intelligent designer, i.e. God, then how did fire, tools, the wheel, and Ford Pintos come to be? Isn't that intelligent design on a more limited scale?
32 comments
another one who fails high school biology forever.
it's amazing how my HS biology teach --- who was a creationist fundie, but had the integrity to teach to the set curriculum regardless --- could give teenaged-me a decent understanding of how natural selection works, yet these numbnuts can't manage to pick up the basics nohow.
" Having an owl's face evolve by itself on a butterfly without a demonstrated need for it - a need involving intelligence - just doesn't make much sense."
Pontificating on something you demonstratably know nothing about just doesn't make much sense.
Unless of course you want to make yourself and your religion look like morons.
Here, let one of your own explain it:
"...things may be known with the greatest certainty
by reasoning or by experience, even by one who
is not a Christian. It is too disgraceful and ruinous,
though, and greatly to be avoided, that he
[the non-Christian] should hear a Christian speaking so
idiotically on these matters and, as if in accord with
Christian writings, that he might say that he could
scarcely keep from laughing when he saw how totally in error they are. . . .
With Scripture it is a matter of treating about the faith."
St. Augustine
Evolution doesn't say that butterflies intentionally and knowingly change the pattern on their wings.
Just like the strawman you created, if you only had a brain...
Misunderstanding evolution this badly can *only* be down to wilfull, deliberate ignorance.
If Karajou were really that stupid, he / she would not be able to feed himself / herself.
Or, the butterflies that looked more like owls were more likely to survive to pass on their genes?
Wait...
Did you just say that god designed the Ford Pinto?
So why didn't God put owl faces on all butterflies? For that matter why did He make birds in the first place if He didn't want them to kill butterflies? Why does God always seem to do stuff in a ridiculous, roundabout, Rube Goldberg way that looks exactly like He did nothing at all?
Hold on to those thoughts, Karajou, however idiotic they are, they may be the only way to tell the difference between you and a block of granite.
Yeah, sure because either there was god or that one butterfly one day noticed the pattern landed on a tree and concentrated really really hard until his pattern changed.
Or maybe, the pattern evolved by natural selection. Selecting those butterflies of that speices out that didn't have a pattern more similiar to that pattern, probably by the less pattern-y butterflies being eaten faster and therefor unable to produce.
Why is it so hard for these people to accept that not everything that looks like it has been designed, actually was designed? Take cities for examples, "organisms" that have developed often over hundreds or at least dozens of generations, were not one clear "designer" could have made the work, and yet you see patterns and even "species" of cities (string, crircular, waterfront), they aren't saying that these cities were created by a god - so how can it be so hard to think the same thing for a butterfly?
Dammit, I an't reach my cup of tea and the cat's sitting on me. Well, I suppose it's about time to evolve tentacles. And maybe some fins. It would make swimming easier. Come to think of it, I could experiment with the other gender all I want, considering I'm intelligent enough to evolve stuff that would be useful to me. See the fallacy?
Also, who owns this nondescript republic?
Two things:
1) Christians are becoming observably more stupid as time goes on. De -evolving as it were.
2) They're still the dominant majority in the US.
Therefore we can conclude that Idiocracy was a documentary.
(Why not? It's smarter than anything that urinal cake had to say.)
Again, you seem to be under the impression that evolution occurs in an individual living organism and not over hundreds of thousands of generations. An owl's face did not just suddenly appear on a butterfly, that took thousands, if not millions of years. Each successful generation ((The ones that went on to pass off their genes because they weren't eaten)) had better and better camoflague until it led to what you see today.
Nature not god.
Nature selected the butterfly with the owl like wings for survival.
I remember how natural selection was first taught to me. The white moths and black moths in the trees around the plant that spewed black soot all over the trees.
Did anyone here about that in bio 101.
Karajou, did you even take bio 101?
Which is why the Dodo - although a bird - was created without the need for flight abilities.
Because God didn't want to have all the pretty butterflies to be eaten by them, which is why he 'poofed' into being flying butterflies and flightless Dodos! [/hyper-sarcasm] [/Fridge Logic]
"And if science says there is no such thing as an intelligent designer, i.e. God, then how did fire, tools, the wheel, and Ford Pintos come to be? Isn't that intelligent design on a more limited scale?"
I don't think it's doing your argumental case any good, re. credibility, to be saying 'Fire' and 'Ford Pinto' in the same sentence as 'Intelligent Design'; and not just for the fact that - in Portugal & Brazil - Ford discovered that this particular car had almost zero sales in those countries, due to the fact that 'Pinto' in Portugese is slang for 'Tiny Penis'...:
There's the little matter of what happened when drivers of Pintos experienced rear-end shunts when another car impacted them.
So if you're comparing Ford Pintos with 'Intelligent Design', no wonder the Creationist cause's last, best hope in it's survival never had a chance several years ago.
That aspect of the Religious Reich's agenda exploded just like a Ford Pinto getting crashed into from the rear. And you Cre(a)ti(o)nists have been equally buttburned since then.
No, no, no! The amrkings didn't evolve to acheive a predetermined outcome (scaring away predators). The markings arose as the result of a change in genetic composition in the butterfly population; because they scared away predators more butterflies with markings survived than those without to pass their genes on to the next generation; in time having markings provided a sufficiently great increase in evolutionary fitness for these genes to become fixed in the population.
No intelligence needed or involved--just something called 'natural selection with respect to environment'
Confused?
So were we! You can find all of this, and more, on Fundies Say the Darndest Things!
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