Lions and natural selection

[QUOTE][b]Oh I think this example is evidence of a good design, a program to maintain quality control of an animal.[/QUOTE][/b]You think that the cannibalism of the young and weak so a male lion can satisfy his lust is a Godly design?Anyhow if that instinct is a product of genetics it's not difficult to see how it could evolve. Crave to eat cubs that don't smell like you and you procreate more, so other lions start practicing infant cannibalism. If a sense of taste is bred into an animal, the mystery vanishes quickly. But how genetics translates into behavior, even in people, is not clear and is the focus of much research.

[QUOTE][b]Yes, it is a quality control. It helps to ensure the strongest of the species breeds its genes into the gene pool, thus helping the created creature kind to have a greater chance at existing longer.[/QUOTE][/b]What can I say, other than that you have a pretty strange concept of God. [QUOTE][b]I think this makes an aweful lot more sense than any of these scenario's you fella's are trying so desperatly hard to imagine. [/QUOTE][/b]Actually it's the same thing, only you said God did it, which drags up interesting concerns about your personal view of the nature of God. [QUOTE][b]So the lion needs to develope the instinct to know the difference between his cubs and other cubs[/QUOTE][/b]Scent recognition is endemic in most predatory mammals, including cats. [QUOTE][b]then he has to develope the instinct to only eat the cubs that don't smell like him. Hmmm... Can you explain that one?[/QUOTE][/b]Yes, consider it as a genetically transferred behavioral disorder to eat cubs. It conflicts with his natural instinct to not devour his own cubs. You end up with other cubs being eaten, but not his own.The point is, the emergence of this behavior is not unexplainable.

[QUOTE][b]Quality control.[/QUOTE][/b]Is that what Hitler called it?I cannot accept that it was programmed because it contradicts my image of God. I also don't think that killing cubs benefits the species at large. For a lion to have fathered the cubs, he would have had to have driven off other competitors, that is, be stronger than other lions. Being too old to maintain dominance is not a genetic flaw, and destroying his offspring will not exert any sort of "quality control" over the species. The only microevolutionary advantage to killing cubs is in behavior of the one that does the killing, and the only "superior" genes that it specifically propagates are those genes that lead to the killing. [QUOTE][b]Programmed designed.[/QUOTE][/b]You've made a point that how genetics transcribes to behavior is supposedly a weakness in the evolutionist view of this behavior. Yet your view also requires that DNA transfers behavior because that is the only way this "program" can be transmitted from one generation to the next.

[QUOTE][b]What I want to know is how this instinct developed without the lion going through a stage where he killed every cub?[/QUOTE][/b]Well that's too bad, because behaviorisms don't fossilize. But we can speculate that male lions have always avoided killing cubs that smell like them, and have always been at least indifferent to cubs that don't. At that point, it is possible to eat cubs selectively.

[QUOTE][b]So just poof he gets the mutation to kill all non-related cubs for no reason?[/QUOTE][/b]Yeah and because it serves him there are plenty of more lions with the same mutation. [QUOTE][b]This is what you're saying. My computer has windows 2000 on it. It used to have windows 98, but then poof, one day the computer install windows 2000 on it's own. Oh, and no one ever programmed windows 2000.[/QUOTE][/b]Terrible analogy. Your computer would not get 2000 on its own overnight but if it rewrote it's OS, one line at a time, selecting each positive change of code, over the years it would improve and you would eventually be justified in renaming your OS.