The best book I have read about ethology is “Nature’s I.Q. — Extraordinary animal behaviors that defy evolution”, by Balazs Hornyanszky and Istvan Tasi, Torchlight Publishing Inc. 2009. I suggest reading it. The authors provide a rich summary of almost all animal behaviors about predation, defense, construction of complex structures (webs, nets, traps…), disguise, deception, feeding, partnership, language and communication, navigation, coupling and mating, etc. The most animal skills are innate and hereditary.
They ask:
How do the animals know when and how they should do what they do? Where does nature’s I.Q. come from? […] Different animal species are also equipped with specific problem-solving abilities; however most of these work not in a conscious, but in an automatic hereditary way. Where does this encoded intelligence come from? (pag.8)
The book examines the evolutionist explanations about the origin of animal behaviors but the authors don’t believe in them:
A theory supposing a series of accidental changes in the genes by no means provides a satisfactory explanation for the biological forms with which these behaviors are associated. (pag.136)
I agree with the authors. I add only a note to their arguments. Let’s suppose for the sake of argument that the genome fully accounts for the creation of the body. Far now nobody has proved that, but concede that it is true. Let’s speak in informatics terms. The body is only the “hardware”, behaviors are instructions, i.e. “software”. We can consider this software as installed into the nervous system, the brain, of the animal. The genes should have to code the instructions to construct the body and the brain in the first place, then to create the instructions to be installed into the brain. In short, instructions to create instructions. In informatics this has a name: “meta-programming”. Meta-programming is an advanced computer-programming technique, which is used to develop very powerful and flexible software applications. It involves multiple hierarchical levels of abstraction. Only intelligence is capable to create such things.
So evolutionists are before another dilemma:
(1) The genome is the unique engine of creation. Then it has to account for the instructions to create the hardware-body, plus the meta-instructions to create the software-mind for behaviors and instincts. The genome is meta-programming! Since meta-programming is advanced feature of intelligence naturalistic evolutionism fails because is incapable to explain the origin of species in all their hardware/software, body/soul aspects.
(2) The genome is not the unique engine of creation. Something else accounts for the animal behaviors and instincts. Since evolutionism is a genome-based theory, it cannot explain in principle what is not based on genes. Evolutionism fails again.
Let’s add this dilemma about ethology to the list of reasons why evolutionism is bankrupt and intelligent design is the best explanation of life and species.
Hornyanszky and Tasi write in the conclusion of their beautiful (and superbly illustrated) book:
Contrary to the popular idea that the living forms in this world evolved spontaneously, without any higher control, abundant phenomena around us — like the behaviors of animals — strongly indicate that our world was designed and created by a supernatural, intelligent being of amazing knowledge and abilities. In reality, nature’s I.Q. is the creator’s I.Q.. (pag.147)
Obviously the last sentence has to be meant in the sense that the relative degrees of I.Q. we find in the living beings in a wide range, from the lowest of unicellulars to the highest of man, come as by-products from the infinite and absolute intelligence of the Creator.