Swarms--Another Support for Intelligent Design

Sometimes The National Geographic is, albeit unwittingly, one of the best sources for confirmation of an intelligent design perspective. Case in point? This excerpt from the July 2007 article, “Swarm Theory.”

[American] Air Liquide [industrial and medical gas producers in Houston] developed a computer model based on algorithms inspired by the foraging behavior of Argentine ants (Linepithema humile), a species that deposits chemical substances called pheromones.
‘When these ants bring food back to the nest, they lay a pheromone trail that tells other ants to go get more food,’ Harper explains. ‘The pheromone trail gets reinforced every time an ant goes out and comes back, kind of like when you wear a trail in the forest to collect wood. So we developed a program that sends out billions of software ants to find out where the pheromone trails are strongest for our truck routes.’
Ants had evolved an efficient method to find the best routes in their neighborhoods. Why not follow their example? So Air Liquide combined the ant approach with other artificial intelligence techniques to consider every permutation of plant scheduling, weather, and truck routing—millions of possible decisions and outcomes a day. Every night, forecasts of customer demand and manufacturing costs are fed into the model.
‘It takes four hours to run, even with the biggest computers we have,’ Harper says. ‘But at six o’clock every morning we get a solution that says how we’re going to manage our day.’


After untold hours developing the algorithms and computer models, it still “takes four hours to run, even with the biggest computers we have” to duplicate what lowly Linepithema humile ants have been doing for millennia. As much as any complex eye, these social structure functions seem mathematically beyond possibility to develop even over trillions of years. As you read through the entire article, the wonder of how God has arranged ALL of creation seems so clear!

The entire article that details the miracle of swarming, communal behavior in many different species can be found at

http://www7.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0707/feature5/

As you read, may the magnificent words of Psalm 8 echo in your mind!

Too Busy for the Important Things in Life?

On a private bulletin board, we have been having a discussion regarding a Washington Post reporter’s “experiment” wherein noted violinist Joshua Bell played six classical pieces over a 43 minute period in a busy Metro station
The link is to the article is at
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/04/AR2007040401721.html

Most of the people passing by did not break stride for a moment. Seven out of 1097 stopped to listen and 27 gave a total of $32. Yes, it was morning rush hour, but the thought of so many passing on the opportunity to hear a beautiful concert for free has given us all much food for thought. One of the contributors to our board linked a couple of factors as a possible cause for this ignoring of truly beautiful music: “In addition to being a sad commentary on the busyness in our daily lives what does it also say about the influence that the pop culture mentality, "what's hot today" mindset we have? Because many of those same people who walked by the musician in the subway station would have also paid $100 for a concert featuring this virtuoso if he were playing down the Mall at the Kennedy Center. We don't recognize beauty until someone tells us something, or someone is so.”

My recent contribution to the conversation on the other board:

I think you both have hit upon two factors that are more tied to each other than we might want to think: "the 'what's hot today' mindset" and our overwhelming busy-ness. I see a linkage in that much of the time we end up being so busy because we are caught up in a consumer driven culture that leads us to think we "need" to buy or consume whatever marketers have told us is "hot," even when that means we will need to work longer and harder to find the money to pay for that latest craze.

Benjamin Barber, the author of Consumed: How Markets Corrupt Children, Infantilize Adults, and Swallow Citizens Whole is making the talk show circuit right now, expanding on the premise of his title. His book is polarizing (the Amazon reviewers are split with 5 giving the book three to five stars and another 5 rating it with only one star), but he raises some important points especially for Christians. How much is our worldview impacted or even corrupted by the pursuit of wants that we have elevated to needs?

One of Barber's points is that the church has too often adopted a consumerist mindset itself and thus has lost the role it once played in helping its members (and society) understand the need for self-sacrifice and concern for how our every decision affects others.

Barber's thesis is enough for its own topic, but I wonder if we might avoid missing our own Joshua Bell moments. As we plan our summer activities, can we decide to go sit with our kids on a river-bank and look in the grass for the creatures there instead of spending gas and money to go to an animal park a hundred miles away? Could we invite a family from another culture over for a cross-cultural meal--and fellowship--instead of spending money for an expensive restaurant where we might or might not experience "authentic" cuisine of their country? And if we are out for a walk when some community church might still be ringing its bells in the evening, perhaps we can just stop and listen and ponder how church bells have rung out the news of Christ's love down through history.

Busy lives and the next new thing--can we use our worldview studies to help combat the pernicious effects of this combination of factors?

From Behind the Lawn Mower

As I pushed the mower up along the edge of the raspberry patch this morning, I was startled by movement along the garden fence. A 4 or 5 inch long baby bunny was crashing against it, trying to run from the roar of my engine. But my "rabbit-proof" fence held, and the bunny finally realized that and darted left, through the wood slats of the border fence, into the neighbor's yard.

As I walked on, I remembered the couple of times when we were little and my brothers or Dad would bring in a couple of bunnies about this same size, salvaged after the mother had been hit by the huge field mowers out in the hay. We would coddle them and try to feed them a little milk from doll bottles along with a few tender clover leaves and blossoms we'd eagerly harvest for them from the lawn. All to no avail, as our success rate stayed at zero.

Now, I build fences to keep the little guys out and no longer feel lots of joy at the sight of one in my yard. I remember my dismay when seeing TWO rabbits cavorting in the snow on a moon-lit night earlier this year, right in the middle of what I hoped to be my new garden plot!

Then there are the chipmunks. When I first moved here last year, I was delighted to see chipmunks pop their little Chip and Dale forms on my deck, sometimes coming right up to the screen. At least they weren't squirrels, a rodent I had come to dislike after they had eaten holes in my siding, gotten into my attic, and dug up most of my bulbs back in New Jersey. Here in Minnesota, they had feasted on tulip bulbs as well, but my neighbors have been live-trapping them and taking them out to the rural parks in the area, so their numbers are a little slimmer. So I thought that a few chipmunks would be no problem.

Wrong. It seems everyone who has been around here for very long has some kind of horror story of the havoc tunneling chipmunks can bring, and--sure enough--there are a couple (or more?) living down at the front edge of my garage. To add verity to all the stories, a house one block over is having to put in a new garage floor due to the damage from chipmunks there.

So Phyllis brought over one of her traps last week, and the very next morning one was caught in it. However, as she predicted, it has carried the trap off someplace, so I may need to go poking around in all the hostas to find the little carcass. So far this year, Phyllis and her husband have caught a dozen (their total season take last year was "only" about 16), and there are still little critters skittering around yards all up and down the street. So we will continue our efforts to reduce, at least a little, the wildlife that really does reflect the delightful nature of the neighborhood in which we live.

And all of these thoughts about animals that are cute, cuddly and pesky brought me to the environment and tigers.

Tigers and chipmunks in a single leap.

Last week we went up to the Apple Valley Zoo and had some good views of their massive Bengal tigers, lolling and pacing among grasses. shrubs and trees that looked only slightly less overgrown than my shady backyard. The exhibit included lots of verbiage about the decreasing habitat available for these giant carnivores and the efforts being made to re-introduce them into some areas of their former habitat.

Inconveniently (!) many of these areas are now "overrun' by people, and there is resistance among many of the people there to having to share the land with animals with such well-deserved reputations for not being good neighbors. Now, as I pushed my mower around a very safe lawn, fenced so that not even a stray dog can get in, I wondered what it must be like to wake and see footprints, scat, or even worse evidence of a tiger in the yard overnight. I hope to protect my garden from predatory bunnies and seed-eating birds so I can enjoy fresh produce and perhaps keep my food bill a little more under control. What if, however, my yard held the chickens and goats that would be my only source of meat for the year, and I had to try to find a way to protect these animals from a tiger preying on them nightly? And I can be glad for the fence so that the kids can play out there and not stray into the street. What if I had to watch continuously to be sure my children did not become prey to some massive cat? Those man-eating tiger stories are not mere tall tales but are the stuff of life in too many of these remote villages.

But if the tigers AREN'T protected and helped to increase in number, will they go extinct so that my grandchildren and their children and grandchildren will be able to remember them only as residents in a zoo or in picture books just as we remember the dodo or the passenger pigeon? That would be a sadly diminished world that I hope they will not have to live in.

When Linda and I were trying to save those baby bunnies back in the 50s and 60s, there were several billion fewer people on this finite globe than there are now. We were aware--at least some of us--of the need to protect our environment, and we--at least some of us--were concerned already about the impact of over-hunting, of pesticides, and poor environmental practices on the wildlife around us. But the suburbs and deer had not yet collided, the sighting of a coyote anywhere outside the wilderness was still very newsworthy, and wolves were still being routinely killed because they were "cattle-killers" and dangerous.

So how does one balance trying to live more closely to nature and still keep under control the animals that will naturally be in competition for the food and space we humans need to survive? Certainly people, made in the image of God, have priority should there be a definite "showdown" situation, but the stewardship God has called us to must mean that we consider how we can best co-exist.

The sun is shining, our rains have come at just the right time, and all is beautifully green and lush. This is the upper-midwest weather I missed in Arizona's dryness, and I feel blessed every time I step out in the yard. But I cannot just sit back and savor these gifts without considering how I can work to be sure as many as possible are able to also enjoy the bounties of creation. So no poisons, some trapping (with "kill traps" for the chipmunks, sorry to say), and a willingness to let the bunnies enjoy a few select hostas as their dinner salads.