Carl Zimmer wrote a good article on bedbugs as an example of evolution. In their shift to human victims, they’ve acquired a new morphology and new physiological requirements, and are distinctly and clearly different from their ancestors that fed on bats.
Answers in Genesis, though, has this idea that their perspective is just as valid as that of scientists: they claim to be viewing the same evidence just as fairly, but through the lens of the Bible rather than those crude human-made texts (I think you can see a problem right there).
So they’ve made their own post in reply, and I can summarize it in five words: they are still just bedbugs
. Are you surprised? Of course you’re not. They can describe speciation, adaptation, major changes in the genetic sequence, and large scale drift from the ancestral population, in short, everything that the real scientists have discovered, and then simply shun the wicked “E” word and instead call it variation within a created kind
. And of course, unlike the real scientists who argue that these changes occurred over hundreds of thousands of years, they can say it all happened within a few thousand.
That was one of the more striking observations at the Creation “Museum”: they can accept a limited version of reality, because they have to, but they take the science and relabel it, and further, accelerate the pace of change by many orders of magnitude into some kind of god-fueled hyper-evolution, and it’s all OK.
“they are still just bedbugs”.
The Discovery Institute folks are still just bacteria, really.
There’s a new article in Nature on the complete genome sequences of all of the Galapagos finch species. I’m not holding my breath as to the response from the AiG derpsters…..
And you are still just a monkey, though I’ve heard that monkeys are trying to cover up the evidence out of sheer embarassment.
Bah, the best article about Bedbugs and creationism that I’ve ever read was from the book “Flight of the Iguana” by David Quammen. I got stuck with a creationist/fundamentalist for a first year room mate in University, and when he started in on me about “evil-loution”, I made him read that article.
He never brought up creationism, or evolution, ever again, with anyone, for the rest of the time he was in University.
I’d think creationists would stay away from bedbugs forever once they learned about these guys. It’s hard to envision a loving god deciding that bedbugs should reproduce via homosexual stabbing rape.
Somebody needs to make an gigantic interactive visual tree where you can see the immediate ancestor of the bedbug and see that it is obviously of the same “kind” of bug, even though it’s not a bedbug. The general idea would be that every point on the tree would be of the same “kind” as its parent and children but at the root is the single-celled RNA crystal and way up in the branches would be Ken Ham. Pictures of actual fossils to go with the reconstructions would be nice.
AiG’s position is that if you put a penny in a piggy bank every day of every week of every month for billions of years, and there are billions of other piggy banks where the same thing is happening, it’ll never add up to anything because nobody’s ever seen anything but one penny, per day.
“they are still just bedbugs”
Bats have beds!!? Who knew??!
It strikes me that the idea of trigger words and political dog whistles is part of a much larger category worth more study. The lengths that people will go to in avoiding a particular set of lines or sound waves is interesting.
Modern cladistics would seem to justify the whole “variation within a kind” thing, with the caveat that a “kind” can contain an extraordinary degree of variation. Even humanity is just a variation on the general Gnathostome theme.
I suspect the ‘E’ word they really have problems with is not ‘Evolution’, but ‘Evidence.’
bat-bugs –> bat bugs –> bad bugs –> bed bugs –> bedbugs
Classic Darwinian gradualism.
Out of curiosity, what’s the evidence for “large scale drift” as opposed to adaptation?
Modern cladistics shows that there is only one kind of life on earth, and everything is a variation of it.
@richardelguru #8:
I know AiG get confused very easily, but surely even they know that bats are a kind of bird. And all birds sleep in nests, right? So bats have beds. QED.
…they claim to be viewing the same evidence just as fairly, but through the lens of the Bible…
In other words, they’re not viewing the evidence at all, because the Bible is not transparent.
It’s hard to envision a loving god deciding that bedbugs should reproduce via homosexual stabbing rape.
Oh ye of little faith — that’s God’s way of using nature to tell us all how evil and unnatural homosexual sodomy is.
All of this nitpicking doesn’t address the real question. Why would a loving god create bedbugs in the first place? Of course, anyone that can read the bible and still think Jehova is loving has a very skewed mindset as it is.
@richardelguru
“BATS AREN’T BUGS!” I believe is the response you’re looking for, with thanks to Watterson.
Bed-bugs? Fucking GCHQ even want to listen to my snoring? Bastards.
I’ve heard some creationists say “sure, micro-evolution is real, but not macro-evolution.” That’s how they think they can both recognize and deny reality at the same time.
I beg to differ. I quote from the authoritative paper “Report on Bats”, Calvin, Elementary School Studies (Undated):
Bats have to be bugs. They fly. They’re ugly and hairy. What else could they be but bugs.
Their book of fairy tales is clear that it was humans who gave animals their names, not God. (Genesis 2:19-20). So whether something is a dog or a cat or a bedbug is not something God determines even by their own theology.
@22
I think the belief is that God created a certain number of animal kinds, Adam named them, and all animals in each “kind” are descended from those ur-animals. For example, he named the one of the animals
WolffoxydingocoyotejackalBiteyDog. Or maybe just canine.
As far as I can tell, the definition of kind involves walking up the cladistic tree until you get few enough branches to fit one pair of each branch on an arc. You are allowed to put the animals in a coma, work with juvenile animals, magically clear their mess with seawater geysers, and feed them a diet completely unable to sustain them.