The 17 year cicada’s and the brood X existence might instead be a deliberate choice to send a message to all the other species that it understands evolution. In some way, species are aware of the evolutionary pressures of other species. They can act on this awareness to mess things up for them, but in a playful harassing way. This creature knows how to create a bountiful feast on a schedule that does no good to any other species.
The more sustainable model is that of the distant past civilizations of dramatic inequality in terms of male access to procreation. Those civilizations benefited from maximizing the fertility of their women with the fewest men, while encouraging the excess men to redirect their attentions and aspirations to take advantage of being free from attending to the needs of the females and their offspring.
There is intelligence in biology but the intelligence is more like a house renovator or house-flipper than like an architect or design engineers of some project built from scratch.
Originally posted on Hypothesis Discovery:
Intelligent design is a counter claim against Darwin evolution of unsupervised random variation selected through natural survival at the species level. The intelligent design claim results from matching currently observed design processes (primarily from human designers) with the observed intricate machines found in biology. After the introduction of this proposal,…
Given what we see in nature, we have good moral reasons to hope that evolution is unintelligent and that accidents can result in excellent designs. If a superior intelligence is responsible for these advanced designs, then we would have to ask what we should do if it turns out that this superior designer is actually a villain.
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