42 Evolution and the Fossil Record
FIGURE 2.5. The cruelty of the reproductive habits of the ichneumonid wasps horrified the Victorians and
mocked the idea of a benevolent God. The female wasp stings its prey and paralyzes it; then she inserts her
eggs into the body of the living prey. The eggs then hatch into larvae, which eat the prey from the inside,
consuming less essential organs first and only killing the victim at the very end—at which point, the prey’s
body becomes a cocoon containing the baby wasps about to hatch.
The female wasp (fig. 2.5) stings a prey animal with her ovipositor and lays her eggs inside
the paralyzed prey. After the eggs hatch, the larvae slowly eat the living prey animal from the
inside, destroying the less essential parts first and only eating the essential parts (and kill-
ing the host) at the very end, when they are ready to hatch out of its dead shell. (Shades
of the creepy extraterrestrials in the movie Alien.) The Victorians were horrified when this
example became well known and were at a loss as to how to square this fact of nature with
their idea of a benevolent God who looks after the tiny sparrow and cares about all of his
creation. As Charles Darwin wrote,
I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have design-
edly created parasitic wasps with the express intention of their feeding within the
living bodies of Caterpillars.But that has long been a problem for those who would believe in a God who is all-knowing
and all-powerful. If so, why does he allow innocents to suffer and die? Why can’t he stop
great natural disasters? What about the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, which killed about a
quarter of a million innocent people? This is the classic “problem of pain” (theodicy) that has
always tortured Christian apologetics, but many skeptics consider it good evidence against
a Divine Designer who watches his handiwork closely. As Darwin himself put it (in an 1856
letter to Thomas Henry Huxley): “What a book a devil’s chaplain might write on the clumsy,
wasteful, blundering low and horridly cruel works of nature!”
Reading the ID creationists closely, you find that they don’t offer any new scientific ideas
or a true alternative theory of life competing with evolution. All they argue is that some parts
of nature seem too complex for them to imagine an evolutionary explanation. This is the
classic “god of the gaps” approach: concede to science that which it has already explained
but reserve to supernatural forces that which hasn’t been explained—yet. Back in the Middle
Ages, people thought that God made the heavens run and the stars and planets move until
Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, and Johannes Kepler showed that it could all be explained by