[Jack]

Here's something to think about in the debate between creationism and evolution:

Does intelligent design creationism predict and explain infanticide? Evolutionary theory does. Here in Alaska, any brown bear sow with a cub will go to considerable trouble to avoid interaction with a male, because the male will frequently attempt to kill the cub. It makes sense that the bear would do this - the chances of a particular cub being his offspring are very small, so eliminating a cub almost always eliminates the genes of a competing male. It also makes the sow sexually receptive more quickly, thus increasing the male’s chances of mating. By this means males who commit infanticide make their genes more frequent in the population. In other words, in this case, the genes that make infanticidal bears perpetuate themselves in the gene pool. What about infanticide in humans? There are many cultures in which people committed infanticide under various circumstances. Some cultures set deformed children out of doors to die by exposure. While not morally defensible in our culture, in a society in which resources are scarce, doing this makes a certain amount of perverse sense - you want to expend what little in the way of crops that you have on children who are healthy and vigorous. Evolutionary theory predicts that those parents who expend the least on children of low fitness will better perpetuate their genes. Just because a baby is lost this year, doesn’t mean you can’t try again next year, or the year after, when crops are good. I started with a Google search, and I was disappointed to find that Walker is correct when he says that intelligent design creationism is silent on the issue. I found nothing from an intelligent design creationist on the web5 that said anything about intelligent design creationism’s views on infanticide. That leaves us to explore the issues for ourselves. As Walker notes: What characteristics of the unknown designer might we infer from infanticide? … [T]he issue here is that ID as a theory is doomed unless something is known about the designer and that information can be used to generate hypotheses about the real world. That’s a real problem, because intelligent design creationists frequently refuse to say who or what the creator/designer is. But we can obviously go the other direction here. Infanticide is widespread, not only among people, but also in nature. This is observed fact. Given this, what does it say about the designer/creator? What it necessarily must say is that the designer/creator found nothing wrong with killing children and helpless young animals. Otherwise, this capability would not have been built into creation. Even if we accept the rather ad-hoc and evidence-lacking assertion that “the fall” corrupted creation and infanticide did not exist prior to then, organisms could not be physically capable of infanticide if the tools for it had not been built into life in the first place. Intelligent design creationists say that biological structures are intelligently designed to fulfill their functions. If so, that means that the biological structures that animals use to kill babies were intelligently designed for the purpose of killing babies. Furthermore, infanticide is practiced by organisms that are incredibly diverse. Even plants do it. Bacteria do it. Lobsters do it. The list is incredibly long, and as far as I can tell every class of organism does it. That suggests that not only does the designer/creator condone infanticide, but that he’s positively enthusiastic about it. This picture of the creator/designer is not, I would suggest, the kind of supernatural power or little green alien that my readers would enjoy hanging out with. Of course, science is all about finding out what is true, and not about gathering support for what you want to be true. So all we need to do is look at the evidence. Evolutionary theory makes several predictions and provides powerful explanations for what we observe in the biological world - including infanticide. It is so successful at this that it it responsible for originating or explaining - or both - all of our knowledge of biology. Every day, more scientific studies about evolution are conducted, and every day, all of them show that evolution is sound. Meanwhile, intelligent design creationism? It explains nothing. Even infanticide, which it explains, presumably, by hypothesizing a bloodthirsty infanticide-loving designer/creator, is better explained by evolutionary theory. But it goes beyond this. An intelligent design creationism that explains infanticide with a designer/creator that approves of violence against children cannot cope with the simultaneous presence of altruism in organisms - while evolutionary theory does.

Blue Collar Scientist » Blog Archive » Is Intelligent Design Creationism Pro-Infanticide?
This post was an extension of the article begun here by a behavioral ecologist that studies invertebrates.