Saturday, September 15, 2007

What Type of Pathway Leads to This?

A Creation Evolution Headlines entry with the title Ant Pedometer Discovered quotes this from a research paper (in red):

"Foraging Saharan desert ants, Cataglyphis fortis, use a mode of dead reckoning known as path integration to monitor their current position relative to the nest and to find their way home. This enables them to return on a direct route, rather than retracing the tortuous outbound journey performed when searching for food items in their flat desert habitat, which is often completely devoid of landmarks. The path integrator requires two kinds of input information: about directions steered, as obtained via the ant’s celestial compass, and about distance traveled, as gauged by the ant’s odometer."1

The author of the piece then makes this comment (in blue):

"There was no mention of evolution in this paper. Only in evolutionary theory would someone attempt to say, with a straight face, that celestial compasses, path integrators and odometers are the result of a blind process lacking a navigation target."

Putting it another way, is there any limit to what can evolve through a non-teleological process? Most evolutionists would not put limits on a random mutation, selection process but neither are those maintaining that persepective able to supply us with a testable step by step approach indicating a pathway. Can "celestial compasses, path integrators and odometers" evolve in incremental fashion? How do we know?

1 Wittlinger, Wehner and Wolf, “The Ant Odometer: Stepping on Stilts and Stumps,” Science, 30 June 2006: Vol. 312. no. 5782, pp. 1965 - 1967, DOI: 10.1126/science.1126912.

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