Evolutionists Overlooking the Obvious

Because we are human, we naturally see things from a human-centered perspective. Culture, learning, and even personal preferences can have a part in this. You may have seen movies where someone is leaning against an object, saying, "We'll never find it", but he was touching the object the posse comitatus was seeking. He had the wrong perspective while looking for the thing.

Credit: National Library of Medicine / Open-i (CC by 2.0)

Reading the article featured below brought Basement Cat to mind. Some people dislike cats because they are bad people. No, actually, it's often because they operate from a human perspective, expecting cats to act similar to miniature people with fur and four legs. If you have problems with it, you can't treat it like you would a wayward child; Jackson Galaxy will tell you this. The same with other animals. If y'all want to get along with a beast, you have to take it on its terms, not on your own, you savvy?


Our presuppositions often lead us to think that it's the big things that matter, but we may tend to overlook the small things that can have an impact. Termites are small folk, but they build mounds that are the equivalent of skyscrapers — some can be seen from space. Picoplankton feed on organic compounds, but they can grow and foul up the waters. Oyster reefs do a heap of filtering to benefit the ecosystem. Our Creator enabled many creatures, large and small, with engineering abilities to effect their environments, which is the opposite of Darwinian assumptions.

Some ecologists try to limit the application of the ecosystem engineering concept to the impactful and “big” habitat alterations made by animals. Thus, beaver dams and coral reefs are “big enough” to qualify as ecosystem engineering habitat modifications, but bird nests and prairie burrows are often dismissed as de minimis—not worthy of comparable attention.

This is a “bigger is better” fallacy, which is a manifestation of an anthropocentric (human-centered) viewpoint that evaluates a situation only from the human perspective. If something doesn’t seem big to us, it must not be significant.
. . .

An anthropocentric perspective is unrealistic when evaluating whether animal activity is “big enough” to be ecologically important.

To read the entire article, click on "Termite Skyscrapers Hidden in Plain View". To see a related article, click on "Activist Animals and Ecosystem Engineering".