#50572: Alon Levy — 11/24  at  09:56 AM
Some of DarkSyde's Science Friday posts over at UTI definitely fit the bill, unless 6'-long centipedes aren't downright scary.

#50575: Heathen Dan — 11/24  at  10:01 AM
The late great WinAce compiled a list: Organisms that Look Designed.

#50576: — 11/24  at  10:07 AM
How about these:

http://www.biosci.ohio-state.edu/~parasite/home.html

http://workforce.cup.edu/buckelew/

http://www.zoology.ubc.ca/courses/bio332/sporozoa_notes.htm

http://webs.cb.uga.edu/~striepen/medpara/2004schedule.htm

or just google or google images "guinea worm" or
"Echinococcus granulosus" - WARNING - not suitable for post-Thanksgiving dinner viewing.........you have been warned.......

For Echinococcus granulosus:
http://www.soton.ac.uk/~ceb/Diagnosis/Vol8.htm
Pics straight out of ALIEN baby!!!

#50577: Jim Anderson — 11/24  at  10:19 AM
Jesus, you people are quick. In the time it took me to remember WinAce's website, three links were already up.

How about some classic lithographs?

#50578: Jim Anderson — 11/24  at  10:21 AM
Or the National Tick Collection?

#50580: — 11/24  at  10:30 AM

(except to each other, of course: there's no creature so odious that its mother can't find something to love in it, I guess)

I'm not so sure about that. Off the top of my head cannibalism is common in insect species, and there are many species of, say, spider where the young actually eat their mother. Hard to love your kids after that in general.

#50581: — 11/24  at  10:30 AM
Of course, they're only evil to creationist types, but show those people the sex life of bonobos and they go apeshit. Suddenly they're not so keen on drawing lessons from nature.

#50583: — 11/24  at  10:38 AM
My friend was in a Bio class and one of her fellow students asked about ID. The teach stood and thought for a bit then start drawing a spiral on the board. Then he finished by making it a snail. Looking at the snail, he drew a little dot on the head and said "this is the mouth," he then drew another dot, just above the mouth and said "this is the anus. I only have one question... Why?, Whyyyyyyyyyyyy?"

#50584: Raven — 11/24  at  10:45 AM
Well, your own zebrafish are cannabilistic toward their eggs--I think any species where adults eat same-species young would count toward Chomsky's "malignant design". Even my beloved bears have a very poor showing on that score.

As for kinky, forget mammals--they're just vanilla. *Fish* is where you want to look for kinky.

Edriolychnus (Angler fish) females [search on "angler fish" without quotes on this page] lure much smaller males to themselves via pheromone. The males then attach themselves to the females, becoming parasites that get all their nutrition from her. As she releases the eggs, they fertilize them, but except for their testis, they basically wither away from disuse--or at least, so I learned in repro endocrinology class. I just came across an article which argued that [while] "The eyes of both parasitic males are very degenerate. There is no histological evidence of degenerative changes in the male digestive system, heart or gills", so clearly there is more to be found out.

Either way, though, it's kinkier than mammals.

#50585: Ron Sullivan — 11/24  at  10:46 AM
Wasn't Darwin talking about some of these critters -- was it the aphids that eat their way out of their mothers? -- when he made that remark about what a book a devil's chaplain might write about the wasteful cruelties of Nature? Hey, send them straight to the urtext.

#50587: Alon Levy — 11/24  at  11:03 AM
No, I'm fairly positive the insects that eat their way out of their mothers are different from aphids. If I remember correctly, these insects are strictly asexual, whereas aphids seasonally alternate between phases of sexual and asexual reproduction.

#50589: John H. Morrison — 11/24  at  11:09 AM
My own example of brain-dead design is using the same facility for toxic waste disposal as for reproduction. But it makes perfect sense with evolution.

#50590: Chris Clarke — 11/24  at  11:13 AM
My personal favorite:

The bedbug Xylocaris maculipennis has adapted a curious way of reproduction, that of homosexual stabbing rape.

A few bedbug species make use of a mating plug, which a male inserts post-copulation. Effectively the male seals her vaginal opening upon withdrawal. This has a distinct evolutionary advantage as it prevents other males from mating with her. Some bedbug species thus employ stabbing rape, where the male impales the female via her abdomen and thus circumvents the mating plug.

In Xylocaris maculipennis, the male will at times impale and inseminate other males while they are engaged in the process of copulation. This allows the rapist's genes to enter the bloodstream to be carried to females by the victim. In this way, the rapist conceives by proxy. In A Natural History of Sex, Adrian Forsyth writes, "The sperm of the rapist enters the vas deferens of his male victim and is used by the victim during copulation." This also occurs with fresh water snails of the genus Biomphalaria, that are vectors for schistosomiasis).

#50593: — 11/24  at  11:49 AM
"If I remember correctly, these insects are strictly asexual, whereas aphids seasonally alternate between phases of sexual and asexual reproduction."

Sweet. Care to elaborate?

#50597: mtraven — 11/24  at  12:14 PM
All things dull and ugly,
All creatures short and squat,
All things rude and nasty,
The Lord God made the lot.
Each little snake that poisons,
Each little wasp that stings,
He made their brutish venom,
He made their horrid wings.
All things sick and cancerous,
All evil great and small,
All things foul and dangerous,
The Lord God made them all.
Each nasty little hornet,
Each beastly little squid,
Who made the spikey urchin,
Who made the sharks, He did.
All things scabbed and ulcerous,
All pox both great and small,
Putrid, foul and gangrenous,
The Lord God made them all.
AMEN.

-- Monty Python

#50598: — 11/24  at  12:30 PM
PZ Myers wrote:

I've got a request for more information on adaptations and species that call into question the existence of a benign creator—you know, a big guy in the sky who loves everything and wants them to be kind and who wants people to only have sex in the missionary position, and only for procreation.\

It is said that the meek shall inherit the earth (go figur where THAT was written!). So maybe life was created for the parasites! But this still doesn't call into question a benign designer; even a benign government must make harsh punishments for those that violate its deepest laws. What would a benign designer do to organisms that could not otherwise function the same way according to its plan? Invent painkillers for women giving birth! Invent doctors to invent the painkillers then! Invent cloning so a woman doesn't HAVE to give birth. Invent cloning to prolong human life and eradicate congenital disease! The possibilities are endless!

#50603: — 11/24  at  01:31 PM
I’m not much of an authority, except I’ve been drawing (mainly) vertebrates for almost 60 years (40 professionally) and even the critters that look like they’re well designed are actually jerry-rigged versions of a very few basic forms. With any imagination or intelligence, there’s no need to build a bird with all the same basic skeletal elements as a lizard or a man.

#50608: — 11/24  at  02:19 PM
EvoWiki on suboptimal design: http://tinyurl.com/9y33l

Oolon Colluphid on Infidels has a page, too, but it's currently frozen for exceeding bandwidth limits.

#50610: Alon Levy — 11/24  at  02:40 PM
Sweet. Care to elaborate?

If I remember correctly, the insects that borrow their way out of their mothers, killing them in the process of being born, reproduce only by parthenogenesis, whereas aphids reproduce by parthenogenesis in the spring and summer, when temperatures are high and food is abundant, and then give birth to males who mate with females in the fall, as harsher conditions make sexual reproduction more effective.

#50615: — 11/24  at  03:02 PM
As I recall from a couple of Gouldn't essays and from the delectable Dr Tatiana, some of the insects that have the young eat the mother also have the female young mating with their brothers inside the mother before they're even born. IIRC, they go through parthenogenetic generations until their food resource starts to dwindle, then do a sexual generation whose females then go looking for more food.

If nobody else has dug into this by tonight, I'll see if I can find which particularly kinky bugs these are (and how wrong I've been).

Trackback: KD - Kinky Design Tracked on: The Uncredible Hallq (72.9.234.70) at 2005 11 24 15:28:20
PZ Myers responds to a call for facts of biology that call the idea of a begign designer into question: I suggested... Judson's Dr. Tatiana's Sex Advice to All Creation: The Definitive Guide to the Evolutionary Biology of Sex to show that this put...

#50617: — 11/24  at  03:51 PM
I'm no biologist, but I definitely recommend Dr. Tatiana's Sex Advice to All Creatures. Anyone who still believes in ID after reading that is just plain crazy.

Another argument I've used against IDers is extinction. I ask them why would an Intelligent Designer make a creature that can't survive? This leads to the God as a Bad Engineer argument...

#50619: pough — 11/24  at  04:47 PM
Are there any ID folks who claim that Everything was designed? As far as I can tell, they seem to be saying that most of what Darwinists (whatever that means) say is true, but only things like the very beginnings of life (um... not filed under "evolution" but that's another issue), flagellae (sp?), blood clotting and possibly whatever caused humans to be so incredibly "special" are the Design Events. But they also seem to be saying that the Few Design Events are a sign that all Darwinism (whatever that means) is wrong and a Crumbling Facade. So they can give us Darwinists (whatever that means) the big bad evolved signs of Idiotic Design. Those things are all Real and True. But there are those few Key Design Events; those ones are Truly Designed. Those ones, besides being true, are Proof Positive that all the rest of Darwinism (whatever that means) is a lie and a joke and a hoax and Obviously Untrue.

#50620: — 11/24  at  04:47 PM
You want to be wary with Zimmer. In 'Parasite Rex' his chapter on guinea worm is bogus. Turns out there is not any usable vermifuge for this worm.

No doubt the links above to guinea worm (thanks, Dark Matter) are technically reliable.

The best work about guinea worm and people is, however, a novel, 'Cause Celeb,' by Helen Fielding.

Yes, the one who wrote 'Bridget Jones' Diary.'

#50621: Chris Clarke — 11/24  at  04:55 PM
Not entirely off-topic, Elissa Feit recently posted a quick poem on inteligent design.