Nova had a show about rats; it is available on line. It was on the Tivo and I watched it with JMan and Bookzilla before going to school. There is a place in northeast India, where the bamboo blooms and seeds on a 48 year cycle. A rat plague accompanies the cycle and, after the bamboo fruit are all gone, the rats spill out from the jungle to consume all grain and anything else that is edible. The local villagers fear the rat plague because they can eat the year’s harvest in days.
The black rats have a shorter getstation cycle than other species and the cycles are spread out when there is little food. Female rats will eat offspring if there is little else to eat. When the bamboo start to blossom and fruit, the rats start turning out more litters, one every three weeks or so. Because of the abundance of food, all of the rats survive and prosper. This continues until all the bamboo fruit is consumed and then the rats forage out to get whatever other food is available. When they run out of food, they fall back to the stable pattern of reproduction.
After watching the show, I drove Bookzilla to school. I mentioned that while intelligent design has no good explanation for this behavior on the part of the rats, evolution does. She asked what intelligent design was. I sketched out the history, starting from Darwin, and his reluctance to publish, touched on the Scopes trial, and current procedural attempts to get control of school boards so as to further the teaching of creationism as science.
While talking about the role of religion, I mentioned that Christianity held that the world needed to be redeemed because of the fall from grace in the Garden of Eden, and if there was no Garden of Eden, Christianity had a problem.
She said “I guess there were no bamboo rats in the Gardent of Eden. They would have cleaned the place out.” She gets it.