The Magnificent Crane Fly

Flickr photo: the PhotoPhreak

If ever there was an argument against Intelligent Design, it’s got to be the Crane Fly – AKA the Leatherjacket, AKA Holorusia rubiginosa for those of a more scientific bent.

Here’s the Wikipedia description of this evolutionary misfit: “Unlike most flies, crane flies are weak and poor fliers with a tendency to ‘wobble’ in unpredictable patterns during flight, and they can be caught without much effort. Also, it is very easy to accidentally break off their delicate legs when catching them, even without direct contact.”

A species that wobbles in flight? That can be caught without much effort? Whose legs snap off without direct contact? If anyone at Boeing designed a plane with those characteristics, they would immediately be headhunted by General Motors to design the next incarnation of the North American automobile – which would be good news for the flying public, since cars rarely make it off the assembly line these days, let alone off the ground.

So how do we explain the mysterious Crane Fly? I mean, what kind of Intelligent Designer would come up with a bio contraption so superlatively stupid? And what purpose could this creature possibly serve? I recently found myself puzzling over these questions, while stepping over Crane Fly carcasses in the hallway, then watching one nosedive – in classic erratic fashion – under the stove element.

Perhaps the intelligent designer in hiser wisdom invented a creature as fodder for the insect-eating hordes: easy to catch, substantially bigger than your average mosquito, and fitted with detachable appendages for quick ingestion. If you reduce divine intelligence to a barren calculation of inputs and outputs, I suppose you might conceive of such a wing-plucking God.

But does anyone really believe God’s wisdom can be measured by the type of IQ test bookkeepers excel at – anyone outside the hallowed ranks of the Fraser Institute, that is? If the unmoved mover were simply an omnipotent bean counter, evolution would surely have favoured various species of accountant. Those fond of no-nonsense shoes and awful ties would inherit the earth. We would have dogs that know the essentials of math and cats capable of herding themselves.

The former statement about accountants inheriting everything may well be true, but the aspersions concerning cats and dogs are most certainly false. Therefore, I think we can safely conclude that God is not a CMA; and further, that heshe must be emotionally intelligent; and further, that if heshe is emotionally intelligent, heshe must be emotionally intelligent in a supremely intelligent way.

Which is all fine and dandy, as far as theological syllogisms go, but doesn’t bring us any closer to an explanation for the so obviously inept Crane Fly. Non-atheists can't resort to pat answers, like: Existentialism. Or ‘Who cares?’ So I find myself in the awkward position of having to defend the concept of an intelligent universe that somehow produced the absurdity of a Crane Fly.

When a hypothesis fails to explain its intended reality, it must be tweaked, even if a few legs do fall off…

Oh! I can hear you atheists out there ballyhooing: ‘No it doesn’t. It needs to be thrown into the dustbin of history so we can start anew without any old rubbish lying about that might get mixed in with the new order.’ But for me, hypotheses are like children: You don’t toss them onto the garbage heap; you re-invent. So I’m going to make a small adjustment to the Intelligent Design theory, which I believe God would allow, even if the religious right would object.

Intelligent Desire.

See! Only two letters in the entire formula have been altered, but like a mutated chromosome, this segment of verbal code results in a miraculous new perspective. Instead of Crane Fly as gangling embarrassment, we get Crane Fly as wondrous – albeit baffling – attempt at something grand. Perhaps I’m waxing poetic here, but through this adjusted lens I can compare the careening flight of the Crane Fly to the magnificent hubris of Icarus, scorching his wings by orbiting too close to the sun.

The notion of Intelligent Desire places the urge to procreate precisely where it belongs – in the DNA and soul of every living thing. We are all finite but complete, temporal manifestations of an unfolding, collective miracle… call it God, Allah, Nirvana, the Big Bang, whatever you want. All of us – including the hapless Crane Fly – express an urge to expand the spiritual force of the universe and defy the logical inevitability of Death and Entropy.

Are all you crass materialists out there listening? Matter doesn’t matter unless it’s got soul.

Whew! I said a bit more than I intended. But there’s one more interesting tidbit about the Crane Fly that I learned through the haphazard genius of Wikipedia. What we see as the Crane Fly is really only the last stage in that peculiar insect’s varied life cycle. Before morphing into a minute, faltering version of the Kitty Hawk, the Crane Fly spent the better part of its life underground as a squirmy, wormy larva called the Leatherjacket. This previous incarnation needs to be taken very seriously indeed. One last citation from Wikipedia is in order then I rest my case.

Says the all-knowing wiki: “…once they become adults, most crane fly species live only to mate and die. Their larvae, called "leatherjackets", "leatherbacks", "leatherback bugs" or "leatherjacket slugs…" are “…occasionally considered a mild turf pest in some areas. In 1935, Lord's Cricket Ground in London was among the venues affected by leatherjackets: several thousand were collected by ground staff and burned, because they caused bald patches on the wicket and the pitch took unaccustomed spin for much of the season.”

The entry has vaguely religious overtones, don’t you think? But the main point is Crane Flies must really be taken quite seriously after all. When ‘unaccustomed spin’ occurs on the cricket pitch, surely the world must sit up and take notice.