Spiders in the dock for design.

Spiders Have Eight (Well-Designed) Eyes
Evolution News & Views

Have you ever wanted eyes in the back of your head? Spiders have eight eyes, compared to our two. They can boast of better vision than ours on some counts; sharp, color vision that extends into the ultraviolet. Their ample set of peepers allows for division of labor: the main pair in front helps them see detail, while the smaller eyes wrapped around their heads warn them of looming threats. Stephanie Pappas wrote about spider eyes on Live Science recently.

"We see that division of labor within that visual system... That's pretty cool if you think about it, because we only have one pair of eyes."
That was actually a quote from Skye Long, a doctoral student at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, who decided to test and find out what the extra eyes are for. She outfitted an enclosure for her 46 jumping spider subjects and used paint to "blindfold" the principal eyes on a third of them, and the adjacent, smaller eyes (anterior lateral pair) on another third, leaving one third blindfold-free. (Don't worry about the spiders; the paint could be easily removed.)
Then she used an iPod Touch to create images of a black dot growing or shrinking in size. When seeing the "looming threat," the spiders backed up quickly and raised their front legs in defense, as if they felt scared -- even when the principal eyes were covered. This means the anterior lateral pair are crucial for alerting the spider to potential dangers. What are the other four eyes used for? That's what Long wants to find out next.

This would have been a "pretty cool" Halloween animal story, featuring a nice, experimental science project, had not Skye Long wandered off into evolutionary tale-telling:

That means the secondary eyes are crucial for alerting the spider to dangerous motion, Long said. Spider eyes are a "really cool step in evolution," she added; insects have compound eyes with multiple lenses, and some areas of those eyes have certain functions. Spiders, on the other hand, separate out visual functions across their heads.
"This is a different pathway that evolution has taken to allow a very small animal to have a very extensive visual system," Long said.

Right. No matter how cool or well-designed the adaption, just say it evolved. It's a "really cool step in evolution." It's a "different pathway evolution has taken." The blind, aimless, purposeless process of natural selection gave spiders a "very extensive visual system." Turn in your paper and get an A.
Here's a better way. Look what researchers at the Optical Society of America are doing with spiders. Incredible as it sounds, they are taking spider silk and using it for fiber optics. Spider silk is already prized as an ideal material: it's strong, flexible, and biodegradable. Now, a team has found it can also transmit and guide light almost as well as glass fibers.

One team is using it as a light guide in photonic chips, while another is trying to imitate the proteins in silk from spiders and silkworms to be able to manufacture it. This second team has already made a silk-based "plastic" that can be used for everything from biodegradable cups to implantable devices that dissolve in the body. Fiorenzo Omenetto presented his work in a superb TED Talk that raised the audience to their feet without him once mentioning evolution. And he is getting grants from the NSF!


Evolution is a straw scarecrow whenever it appears in biological research. The whole story is intelligent design, in the animals and plants studied, in the experiments devised to gain knowledge about them, and in the applications they lead to. Animal tricks become science's treats.

The winged flocks v Darwin.

Starling Murmurations and Intelligent Design, Revisited
David Klinghoffer




A friend points out the bit of nice news that one of our favorite nature video clips, "‪Dylan Winter and the Starling Murmurations," from the Illustra film Flight: The Genius of Birds, has exceeded a million views on YouTube. Not bad. That's a million plus people exposed to one of the most remarkable demonstrations of the wonders of bird flight.

All those viewers may not know precisely how starling murmurations give evidence of intelligent design. We've discussed this in the past:

"Why Starling Murmurations Suggest Intelligent Design"

"'Not By Chance': Drone Engineers Try the Starling Trick"

"Fly Now; Swim Later"

As Dr. Timothy Standish explained, here in a nutshell is the challenge posed by starling murmurations to traditional evolutionary thinking:

In the cold hard world of survival of the fittest, starlings that stick with the group may enhance their odds of surviving predation. But such an effect is an emergent property of the murmuration. Attributing the origin of murmurations to enhanced survival requires first that murmurations exist, thus making for a circular argument. To circumvent this problem, a Darwinist might invoke cooption. Maybe the ancestors of modern starlings gathered together for some other practical purpose and then, in a lucky coincidence, gained the survival advantage provided by murmurations. But think about the resources consumed by daily migrations followed by considerable time flying about with other starlings. It's unclear why any other proposed reason for investing resources this way would not be equally vulnerable to the criticism of circularity.

Flying in formation has advantages that humans quickly recognized once we mastered powered flight. The most obvious of these involves multiple sets of eyes looking out for enemies or obstacles. If human intelligence can figure this out, perhaps clever starlings can as well. But if there is a genetic component to the behavior -- a reasonable assumption given that starlings form murmurations wherever they are in the world while other birds do not -- then a mechanism for creating the required genetic changes would need to anticipate the need fulfilled by murmurations. Darwinian evolution is blind and unguided, incapable by definition of anticipating anything. In the case of human flight, various types of formation flying were developed in anticipation of a need. Generally that was to survive during battles in the air. Formation flying is not something that pilots stumbled upon in the middle of a dogfight then stuck with; it is a solution to an anticipated need. Intelligence alone has been shown to have produced such solutions.


When it comes to design and murmurations, the elephant in the room is the other abilities birds must possess to achieve the phenomenon. They must have the inclination to fly long distances and to congregate. They must have the ability to navigate, the ability to fly, the ability to perceive and react to the other birds they are flying with, and any number of other wonders. Most people, scientists or not, can see this; but Darwinism demands that we turn a blind eye to such things.

The undeniable logic of the case for design.