I originally posted this last week as a challenge to creation scientists in the 'Macroevolution, it's all around us..." thread, but no one took the bait.
Therefore, I would like to propose it as the basis for a new thread and reiterate this challenge to either ID theorists or creation scientists.
Seemingly, neither the ID nor creation camps deny that insects can evolve resistance to insecticides and bacteria, resistance to anitbiotics.
I would argue that evolutionary biology is the best *working model* to explain these events, predict their occurance, and therefore develop plans of action to prevent their occurance.
The engineering of corn to express toxins produced by Bacillus thuringensis (Bt) has changed the face of American agriculture.
More than 6 million acres of transgenic corn are now grown annually, with the acreage rising every year. However, resistance evolution is a risk for bacterial toxins just as it is for synthetic insecticides.
This biotechnology represents an investment of many 100's of millions of dollars by Monsanto and has been thoroughly examined and reviewed by the EPA. Monsanto and all stake-holders (farmers etc.) have a vested interest in preserving the functionality of this technology (preventing the evolution of resistance in the target pest, the European corn borer, Ostrinia nubilalis), or all that investment will be lost.
Here is one version of the current management
plan.
The same basic plan applies nationwide.
It forms the basis of a legal agreement farmers HAVE to sign in order to plant the corn.
I personally think that the approach has some flaws, and will eventually permit the evolution of resistance in the moths, but it is still the best approach currently available, given various constraints on corn production.
To get you started, here are two of the limitations that evolutionary theory would predict are inherent in the current plan that is a strategy to reduce strong directional selection for resistance evolution:
Dependence on adult moth dispersal over considerable distances.
Dependence on the initial mutation for resistance being recessive.
I have always believed that science is only powerful if it is useful.
So my question is this. How would a plan for resistance management based on creationist science or ID differ from this one that is based entirely on predictions from evolutionary theory ?
How useful are the insights from these 'sciences' in dictating the best course of action?
Starting from scratch, how would creationist science or ID approach the problem of trying to delay resistance evolution?
If we weren't relying on evolutionary theory, what kind of management plan would ID theorists or creation scientists develop?
If either wish to supplant evolutionary theory as the foundation for biological inference, they must be able to address important problems of applied biology such as this one.
I would like to see tangible, concrete management recomendations to replace or amend those in current plan, not just abstract inferences from information theory or thermodynamics.
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