Natural heuristic solutions: evidence against Creationism?

So many things have been covered here... maybe this one too. But this one fits my area of knowledge:In nature, we find many solutions to problems that are not optimal. For example, Tinbergen (see below) finding that seagull chicks will beg for food much more vigorously from colored sticks than their mother's beak or their own mother. I think the abundance of this type of evidence clearly argues against an 'intelligent designer.'One path of rebuttal that I'd like to dismiss is "as just humans, we can't comprehend the mind of God." Any creationist invoking the argument from incredularity has already claimed to understand the mind of God. Otherwise, how could they themselves understand and reason that ONLY GOD could have created such a thing.Thanks!
Ben-------------------

Details on Tinbergen's study (pubmed ref here), as summarized by Vilayanur Ramachandran in his 3rd lecture at Reith 2003 (suggested to be read by sidelined here)(Note: emphasis mine)

quote:

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To answer this question, you need to go and look at ethology, especially the work of Niko Tinbergen at Oxford more than fifty years ago. And he was doing some very elegant experiments on seagull chicks.

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As soon as the herring-gull chick hatches, it looks at its mother. The mother has a long yellow beak with a red spot on it. And the chick starts pecking at the red spot, begging for food. The mother then regurgitates half-digested food into the chick's gaping mouth, the chick swallows the food and is happy. Then Tinbergen asked himself: "How does the chick know as soon as it's hatched who's mother? Why doesn't it beg for food from a person who is passing by or a pig?"

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And he found that you don't need a mother.

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You can take a dead seagull, pluck its beak away and wave the disembodied beak in front of the chick and the chick will beg just as much for food, pecking at this disembodied beak. And you say: "Well that's kind of stupid - why does the chick confuse the scientist waving a beak for a mother seagull?"

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Well the answer again is it's not stupid at all. Actually if you think about it, the goal of vision is to do as little processing or computation as you need to do for the job on hand, in this case for recognizing mother. And through millions of years of evolution, the chick has acquired the wisdom that the only time it will see this long thing with a red spot is when there's a mother attached to it. After all it is never going to see in nature a mutant pig with a beak or a malicious ethologist waving a beak in front of it. So it can take advantage of the statistical redundancy in nature and say: "Long yellow thing with a red spot IS mother. Let me forget about everything else and I'll simplify the processing and save a lot of computational labour by just looking for that."

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That's fine. But what Tinbergen found next is that you don't need even a beak. He took a long yellow stick with three red stripes, which doesn't look anything like a beak - and that's important. And he waved it in front of the chicks and the chicks go berserk. They actually peck at this long thing with the three red stripes more than they would for a real beak. They prefer it to a real beak - even though it doesn't resemble a beak. It's as though he has stumbled on a superbeak or what I call an ultrabeak.

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Thread moved here from the Proposed New Topics forum.

oo another possible scenario for a run-away feature evolution ...

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we are limited in our ability to understand
by our ability to understand RebelAAmerican.Zen[Deist
{{{Buddha walks off laughing with joy}}}

Bumping this topic, because...I'm interested in neural systems (i.e. brains!) and how they work. And I'm interested in how evolutionists view neural systems, especially 'innate behavior' based on neural systems. So I'd appreciate any thoughts that people have out there.Thanks!
Ben

My first response: Why would evolutionists view neural systems and/or behavior differently than any other system?Perhaps you could give us more to go on - I'm not sure what you are looking for here...

OK, I think I can express the thought concisely now. It took a bit of thinking. And it goes a little somethin' like this.. (hit it!) After further analysis, it is premise 2 (above) that is important in where I want to go.In order for evolutionists to scientifically argue that some "system" (there's that word again) is truly an adaptive one, they MUST have a link between genetics and that system. If this link does not exist, then, the way I see it, only the principle of parsimony could be used to say that the system is 'probably' governed by genetics.So, to summarize, BEFORE calling a "system" adaptive, evolutionists need to have some scientific evidence that the system is governed by genetics.Neural systems, and especially "innate behavior" such as the one given in the OP, I think are important and COMPLEX "systems" which govern pretty much everything to do with vertibrate animals. I'll give three examples:

1. The 'innate behavior' for the birds to search for food from 'long thin red things' (see reference in OP)
2. The 'innate behavior' for things to either a. walk right out of the womb (cows?) or b. learn to walk
3. The 'innate' aspects of something like emotion or facial expression

I know a bit about neuroscience, but not too much yet. I'd like to know more from the people here. I'd also like to know if people place the same importance on this issue as I do. From what I've read in the forum, I'm expecting a resounding "NO!" and I'm interested to know why.Thanks!
Ben

My natural response to your post is to provide genetic links to innate behavior. Here are some:- The zebrafish spacecadet mutant disrupts a known neuronal connection, resulting in fish that swim towards predators instead of away from them.- Female mice with a disrupted Peg3 gene exhibit poor maternal care for their young.- A variety of QTL (quantitative trait loci) analyses have linked genetic loci to behavior in a variety of organisms, though in most cases the specific causative genes have not been found. One interesting application of this research has been in the genetic mapping of the genes involved in the many innate behaviors of honeybees.I'm sorry I don't have time to provide direct links to sources now; I suggest you go to http://www.pubmed.org and search for "spacecadet" or "peg3 maternal" or "behavior QTL" to pull up abstracts on the above examples.I'm not sure if this helps answer your question or not.

It's definitely a good start, and I will go to Pub Med.I think I was hoping to find some causative links rather than just correlational links, but I just realized... evolution wouldn't care about causation or correlation. Correlation of behavior to genetics is good enough for evolution to occur.I'll give a look at some of the articles, and see where I get. I just HATE to be missing so many causative steps...Thanks.
Ben