Another Nail in the Coffin of Intelligent Design
Through a very sophisticated series of experiments, scientists have discovered how bees fly.
Proponents of intelligent design, which holds that a supreme being rather than evolution is responsible for life’s complexities, have long criticized science for not being able to explain some natural phenomena, such as how bees fly.
Now scientists have put this perplexing mystery to rest.
Using a combination of high-speed digital photography and a robotic model of a bee wing, the researchers figured out the flight mechanisms of honeybees.
“For many years, people tried to understand animal flight using the aerodynamics of airplanes and helicopters,” said Douglas Altshuler, a researcher at California Institute of Technology. “In the last 10 years, flight biologists have gained a remarkable amount of understanding by shifting to experiments with robots that are capable of flapping wings with the same freedom as the animals.”
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In order to understand how bees carry such heavy cargo, the researchers forced the bees to fly in a small chamber filled with a mixture of oxygen and helium that is less dense than regular air. This required the bees to work harder to stay aloft and gave the scientists a chance to observe their compensation mechanisms for the additional toil. The bees made up for the extra work by stretching out their wing stroke amplitude but did not adjust wingbeat frequency.
“They work like racing cars,” Altshuler said. “Racing cars can reach higher revolutions per minute but enable the driver to go faster in higher gear. But like honeybees, they are inefficient.”
The work, supervised by Caltech’s Michael Dickinson, was reported last month in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The scientists said the findings could lead to a model for designing aircraft that could hover in place and carry loads for many purposes such as diaster surveillance after earthquakes and tsunamis. They are also pleased that a simple thing like bee flight can no longer be used as an example of science failing to explain a common phenomenon.
Proponents of intelligent design, or ID, have tried in recent years to promote the idea of a supreme being by discounting science because it can’t explain everything in nature.
Discounting science because it has not yet explained everything in nature is a rather odd position for believers in Intelligent Design to take.
Following their “logic”, since Intelligent Design explains nothing, shouldn’t it be completely discarded?
The proponents of Intelligent Design explain nothing but believe their beliefs are an explaination for everything. Once again you can see how blurring the line between existence and nonexistence leads to totally irrational thinking.
ID says that a non-verifiable explanation (no explanation) is all explanation. Nonexistence=existence.
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