In this post I want to make some comments on a news item about the Narwhal.
Quotes and comments;
1. 'Unicorns exist – in the north sea. Not horses, these are marine mammals, called narwhals, a kind of whale that sports a unique spiraling tooth that gives them the appearance of a unicorn. Scientists have puzzled for centuries over what these tusks are for. Leading theories were that males used them for joisting to defend territory, or they were artifacts of sexual selection. Now, scientists from Harvard School of Dental Medicine under Martin Nweeia think they have solved the mystery. The tusk is lined with ten million tiny nerve connections that give this unusual tooth an extremely sensitive probe into the temperature, salinity and pressure of the icy water in which they live. With the proteinaceous membrane on the outer surface connected to the nerves inside, it acts as an antenna of sorts, guiding the animals to their prey in the deep water or sensing the environment at the surface.
- one could imagine that the story of the Unicorn came about when someone found a Narwhal 'tooth' washed up on the beach... and then imagined it came from some (terrestrial) animal. Their ignorance of narwhals allowed them the 'freedom' to speculate... and they just assumed it was only animals that had 'horns' and so some animal must exist with a horn like this. We see here how easily we can get led astray by our ignorance and by our ideas. Reality is often far different than we think.
2. 'The tooth on males can be up to nine feet long, yet is resistant to breakage. It grows in a spiral pattern straight out without curving, as with elephant tusks. No other mammal has a tooth anything like it; the press release states, “there is no comparison in nature and certainly none more unique in tooth form, expression, and functional adaptation.”
- the evolutionist must tell us what the narwhal evolved from... and from what this 'tooth' evolved. The committed evolutionist cannot allow anything to be unique; all creatures must have evolved from certain more 'primitive' ancestors. So we await the invention of the narwhal story. The more we learn about the creation the more we see how fallacious the idea of evolution is; how impossible it is. We see how out of touch with reality it is, and how it exists only in the fantasy world of textbooks.
- The more we see of reality the more inadequate our theories look. For anyone whose heart has not turned to stone, the discoveries that are being made about the creation are a humbling experience. There is no way some form of chemical Accidentalism can account for what we see. (That at least is my opinion.) Every day the evolutionary pretense becomes harder to defend.
- the term Narwhal is related to the word for corpse; i.e. on account of the white color of this whale. In my view it is evolutionism that is the corpse. Evolutionary materialism hasn't been done in by clever arguments by creationists, but by reality. The discoveries made by scientists in the last couple of decades (let's say starting with DNA) have been the hammer that's smashed the e. idea to pieces. (That's not perhaps the best imagery or symbolism....) As we gaze ever further into the 'heart' of things, as we see more and more how incredibly complex things are, as we see how codes are at the heart of all living things, it gets harder and harder to believe this is just a product of random chance working blindly and mindlessly on inert matter.
- the 9 foot long tooth of the Narwhal is just one more stake through Darwin's heart. (What would Darwin say if he read this story? Probably something like, ''It's not impossible to imagine that this developed from....'' No; it's not impossible to imagine the impossible; sf and fantasy writers do it every day... but that doesn't make it real, true, or possible. I can imagine that Darwin was really a bible believing creationist whose been badly misunderstood by all his readers... but this doesn't make it true :=)
3. - 'Leading theories were that males used them for joisting to defend territory, or they were artifacts of sexual selection.'
- look at how dumb the earlier e. ideas on the tooth were. While we can excuse people for ignorance, there's more involved here. Early ideas were based on the Darwinian myth of nature 'red in tooth and claw' that all of life is at heart a murderous struggle with others for dominance and survival. (The conflict model of life.) For the naive Darwinian all of life is either about sex, food, or battle; therefore all organs must be explained in these terms... and this usually done in a simple minded way. (e.g. ''oh look, a long horn, looks like a spear, must be used for fighting.'') Here we see how a powerful idea can 'bend' all the data into its orbit... causing an adherent to see everything in terms of the idea. (As an aside; even within the e. community the 'harmony' model of the world is gaining ground even as the conflict model loses ground. This isn't evidence non-creationists are abandoning E. as a paradigm, but it's evidence of how theory affects observation and speculation... of how ideas are at the heart of what we think we see in the world.)
- we see in the Narwhal (what we see everywhere) that living creatures (and all their parts and systems) are almost infinitely more complicated than people imagined. If e. is to survive it (at the very least) will have to change radically to deal with all this new complexity. The key problem e's have is to find a way to account for the obvious intelligence we see when we look at creatures at the cellular level. The so called nano machines and the codes responsible for them are clearly (to many at least) evidence of intelligence... in fact they are intelligent machines if you prefer. Can anyone look that far behind 'nature's veil' and still believe in Accidentalism? (In my opinion materialist philosophers will one day rue the day the microscope was invented.)
- if materialism were true (in some other universe; let's say one created by NASA maybe :=) there would be no Narwhals, at best there would be pond scum.... forever.
- what we see in this tooth (sensor) is how incredibly sensitive some animals (organs) are to the environment; how adept they are at sensing the vagaries of the environment... to detecting minute changes... to knowing it on a very detailed level. It's no doubt fanciful but we could compare the project we call science to a narwhal tooth. In our case we could say this 'sensor' is growing generation by generation... getting more sensitive to the reality we live in. As this 'tooth' (antenna) grows we learn more and more about the world. We become more acutely aware of the incredible detail in things. We are becoming ever more sensitive as it were. The instruments we build are like the narwhal's tooth. But as we learn more about the complexity of living things our ideas about the world will have to change... will undoubtedly change as well. What we are percieving, in a way we have never done before, is how intelligent all things are. While this is great news for creationists, it's bound to be a toothache for materialists.
Notes;
1. I found this story at Creation/Evolution headlines; Marine Unicorn Tusk is a Precision Sensor 12/13/2005
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