Buggin'

From Myrmecos, an ant blog, we get a note on William Dembski, a leading light of the ID (Intelligent Design) movement.  Dembski discovers that ants find the shortest path among various points (known mathematically as the Steiner Problem) and has this to say.

On Darwinian evolutionary grounds [...] one would have to say something like the following: ants are the result of a Darwinian evolutionary process that programmed the ants with, presumably, a genetic algorithm that enables them, when put in separate colonies, to trace out paths that resolve the Steiner Problem. In other words, evolution, by some weird self-similarity, embedded an evolutionary program into the neurophysiology of the ants that enables them to solve the Steiner problem (which, presumably, gives these ants a selective advantage). I trust good Darwinists will take this in without skipping a beat, mumbling something like “evolution sure is amazing” or “natural selection is cleverer than us.” Dispassionate minds might wonder if something deeper is at stake here.

Actually, it's not hard to explain how ant colonies do this, and Myrmecos sets him straight.  In fact, for Dembski not to understand this mechanism almost seems like willful ignorance.

Now Dembski knows, and is not implying otherwise, that ants (or any life aside from humans) don't consciously use higher math to solve problems any more than a baseball studies parabolas. Yet I would also think he must know if he's studied biology that life systems regularly evolve in ways that can be described by complex mathematics.  Insect research is full of examples of bugs evolving mathematically efficient solutions to problems presented by nature.

That's what bothers me most.  Not the specific, mistaken claim, but the general, bad argument.  When faced with the explicable, instead of doing research, Dembski would rather throw up his hands and say such things can't be understood through known natural means.  To back up his claim, he resorts to mockery.  No matter how much his supporters may want him to be right, aren't they embarrassed by this?