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of us think of as evolved species were all in fact created individually by God—and accordingto most reports he is a glib and effective debater, a man of some charm, good with crowds and capable of making fools of opponents who underestimate his intelligence. He holds a doctorate in biochemistry and seems possessed, if the photos do justice, of a bad toupee. A country slicker, is what you might call him. Xylocaris maculipennis is an African bedbug. There had to be more than blind coincidence involved in bringing this man and this insect both into my purview during the same week, but the precious opportunity nevertheless slipped past me. Dr. Gish was packed and gone to the next town before I could solicit his thoughts concerning X. maculipennis and the Proof-by-Design.
    What I refer to as the Proof-by-Design is a venerable piece of logic, lately refurbished by the creationists. One of its earliest and most influential formulations was by John Ray, an English naturalist of the seventeenth century who did pioneering work in botany and then, in 1691, published a book called The Wisdom of God Manifested in the Works of the Creation. Ray’s argument in this book was (as the title declaims) that the elaborate design of the natural world—the matching of form to function within living creatures, the harmonious intermeshing of creatures with each other—proved the necessary existence of an omnipotent, benevolent Creator. A century later Linnaeus himself (often thought of as the first hardheaded taxonomic biologist) voiced the same idea. Right up to the time of Darwin, this view of nature was cited by both naturalists and theologians as cogent evidence for the sort of avuncular, dependable God we could all love and admire. According to one version: “This perfect Unity, Order, Wisdom, and Design, by which every Individual is necessarily related to, and made a dependent Part of the Whole, necessarily supposes and implies a universal, designing Mind, an all-powerful Agent, who has contrived, adjusted, and disposed the Whole into such Order, Uniformity, concordant Beauty and Harmony, and who continues to support, govern, and direct theWhole.” Clearly the cheerful sport who wrote that sentence had never heard of Xylocaris maculipennis.
    Now the same Proof-by-Design is back in fashion among creationists, brought up to date for a new post-Darwinian purpose. These days the argument is used to prove, not merely that God does exist, but also that evolution doesn’t.
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    Consider the cleaner wrasse, for instance. This little fish is the hero of an article titled “Nature’s Challenges to Evolutionary Theory,” published by Duane T. Gish’s own outfit, the Institute for Creation Research. As any marine biologist knows, a cleaner wrasse makes its living by swimming into the opened mouths of much larger, predaceous fish and picking away parasites that have infested the soft mouth tissues. The bigger fish not only permit this to happen; they come to the stations where these little wrasses have set up shop and literally wait in line to be serviced. When the cleaning is done, the little fish is allowed, gratefully, to swim safely back out of the jaws of death. In the view of the ICR, this symbiotic interaction is too complex and too improbable to have arisen by evolution. “The case for creation will be evident in certain special ecological relationships like cleaning symbiosis,” we are told. “The Christian recognizes that such processes reflect the continuing care by which God faithfully upholds His creation.”
    Another big favorite is the bombardier beetle. Duane T. Gish himself has been known to cite this manifestation of God’s hands-on involvement in the designing of nature. The bombardier beetle is a small coleopteran of the genus Brachinus that carries a fancy system of chemical self-defense. Inside its abdomen are two chambers, one