"Wrasses demonstrating Providential Design"

Our natural world has a wide variety of systems, with great degrees of complexity and seeming nonsensical or irrational. Yet, these expectations are human constructs. Authors like Harry Sanders writing for the creationist website ‘Answers in Genesis’ falls into this fallacy of reason. His great inspection of every syllable and phrase of biological studies paired with his passing paragraph asserting the ability of Christian holy texts to explain away these seemingly unsolvable problems without even the basic level of academic pretension of biblical citations or a sympathetic theologian’s quote; this inequality of investigation shows the obvious bias of the website--although hopefully readers understood upon reading the name of the organization.

Another facet of Sanders’ anti-scientific reasoning is their base-level discomfort with empirical confusion. Causation is a hard fact to establish since our universe isn’t a neat, straightforward laboratory without exogenous factors impeding our observations. It’s a rough environment, the ocean especially given our body’s deficiency at life-like ability underwater for long periods of time. Yet Sanders dismisses the messiness, instead deferring to their faith; religion is valid, but there’s a reason its called faith, its based on a belief beyond the physical world. For this part of the adventure of our universe, biological laws reign supreme, and one of those is the theory of evolution.

Let’s dismiss the empirical aspect of Sanders’ article first-off. The impact of cleaner wrasses on individual reefs is not straightforwardly good or bad; its a mix of impacts with their own benefits and deficiencies of their own (Waldie et al). Our view of the natural world, without the social world of humanity and the intelligence of our species, there is nothing constant war between every organism over every resource. Yet take for example the complementaries of cleaner wrasses and parrot fish, with each preferring their own respective mucus (Grutter & Bshary). Imagine instead nature as a marketplace, with differing resources being valued in different ways by different individuals; with each fight fought, battle won, and reef environment rid of cleaner wrasses individual benefits are minimal, it’s just wasted opportunity cost on low-nutrient organisms.

Posted by "Chorryi Chin"