Cassell starts off talking about airplane navigation systems which he worked on for 40 years.
When you talk about sophisticated navigation systems like those used by modern aircraft, these are highly engineered systems. Typically, you know, commercial aircraft have hundreds of thousands, if not millions of lines of code in their navigation and flight control systems. So they’re highly complex.One of the amazing things about this is that according to Darwinian theory all these systems evolved in the brain of this insect, a brain that has only a few hundred thousand neurons, purely by chance. Systems that took intelligent engineers decades to build, or, if we go back to primitive humans, thousands or millions of years, evolved in ants by pure dumb luck.
And there’s a number of aspects of the engineering that’s involved when you build systems like that. One is, they’re highly integrated. So you have to match up not just the software, but the hardware, the sensors, the flight control system, et cetera. And then all of this has to be done in a coherent manner.
And it turns out, surprisingly — not just to biologists, but to those of us that are engineers as well — when you start examining some of these systems in animals, they exhibit the same kind of principles that we use in developing man-made navigation systems.
My favorite example is actually a desert ant that resides in deserts in Africa. These ants actually employ several different types of navigation centers. They use a sun compass, a polarized light compass. They have an odometer, they do chemotaxis, in other words with sensing chemicals. And then they use all that information too, in an integrated manner.
And they actually do what biologists call path integration, what us engineers would typically call inertial navigation — basically the same thing, where they integrate all this information and then are able to navigate accurately.
There's more, of course:
But one of the unique things about it is, whenever they go on a forging excursion from their home nest, they can go on a very circuitous path away from the nest, turning a number of times in different directions. But then when they go to return home, they are able to actually compute a direct path from wherever they are back to their home nest.When Cassell says it's "very surprising" he's understating how utterly astonishing this is. The capability he refers to actually requires the ant to perform trigonometry, a skill that many intelligent students whose brains contain 100 billion neurons, have difficulty with. Here's a short BBC video that shows this: Cassell adds:
Again, it’s based on this inertial navigation type of system. It’s very surprising that such a system exists in an ant.
And we are just now catching up technology-wise with what many animals have been doing for thousands or millions of years. Our human ability to navigate long distances didn’t really become a reality until sometime in the 1700s with the development of accurate clocks that could be used on ships.It takes a prodigious exertion of blind faith, it seems to me, to force oneself to believe that this ability evolved independently of any guidance from an intelligent Mind.
Prior to that, ships had a lot of trouble navigating very long distances because they couldn’t determine longitude in an accurate way.
And finally, with GPS, we have a system that actually starts to mimic what many animals have been doing for a long time.
The co-discoverer of the double helix structure of DNA Francis Crick once wrote that "Biologists must constantly remind themselves that what they see was not designed but evolved."
I'll bet they do have to constantly remind themselves of that. It must be like trying to constantly remind oneself that 2+2=7.
