Amazing Animals

Any land-dwelling mammal wishing to evolve into a whale could certainly practice moving its left-right tail in an up-down fashion, and there is no doubt that it could certainly improve up to a point. Maybe even learn to swim faster and catch more fish. But after that its tail movement would begin to crush its reproductive apparatus against its pelvis. This would have a tendency to lower the animal's sexual urges somewhat and it would soon lose interest in reproduction -- not a very positive evolutionary step. Taken to extremes, this new tail movement would simply crush the whole pelvis. Such a transition would have no survival value whatsoever. The selective pressures of the environment, or natural selection, would work against any such change of tail on a land-dwelling mammal.

To make the claim as evolutionists do that land-dwelling mammals evolved into sea-dwelling whales is to claim that there had to be simultaneous accidental genetic changes which allowed the tail to grow larger while the pelvis grew smaller. And all this ignores the problems caused as the ever shrinking pelvis or hip bones reached the point where they were far too small to support the creature's weight on its hind legs, and yet still too large to let the animal move its tail up and down with any efficiency.

Of course, tails are not the only thing on whales that make them different from land-dwelling mammals. To totally convert a land-dwelling mammal into a whale you would also have to replace its sweat glands with thick layers of blubbery fat, change its eyes so that the light rays under sea water are still brought to focus on the retina, change its skin to produce a curious surface efficiently designed to streamline the flow of water, and also find some way to enable it to give birth to young which suckle under water without drowning, a rather essential 'adaptation.'

In other words, if you wanted to make a tail for a whale you could not do it by using evolutionary random chance small mutational accidents on some land-dwelling mammals, no matter how long you let the process take. A whale's tail is too well designed to be made that way. In fact, it shows all the evidence of the intelligent engineering which we associate with deliberate creation.

B. Snake

HAVE you ever noticed that snakes move rather differently from other reptiles? Those who claim snakes are simply the legless descendants of other reptiles; really don't appreciate just how unique snakes are. No matter how carefully you removed the legs from a lizard, it would never move like a snake. Snakes move the way they do, because they have a distinctive backbone. To make a lizard or alligator into a snake, you would need to add special backbones, (vertebrae) in special places. Without these additional bones, snake movement just isn't possible. Then there's that mouth. You would need to add an extra row of teeth to start with, and then specially reshape them. At the same time you must change and redesign the jaw with a new suspension unit, to give it the special unlockable snake-wide swallow ability.

The skull would then need re-enforcing to give more protection to the brain, and then you would have to change the shape of the throat so that it could breathe as well as swallow. All this before we even consider how to add special ducts and hollows for the snake's venom or saliva, change the lungs, rebuild the eyes, and so it goes on.

Well, how would you make a snake? One way you wouldn't, is by slow small changes (or mutations) to a legged reptile. No observed mutation can do anything like produce the special equipment in a snake, even if you started with a 'soundly functional lizard'. Snakes have not evolved either slowly or rapidly from any other creatures we call reptiles. Not only is there no trace of transitional forms in the fossil record, but no one has ever seen a mutated lizard or snake which would give a clue as to how it could have evolved to become so legless, and yet so perfectly adapted to being a snake. In fact, snakes look so deliberately designed that scientists who say otherwise, haven't really got a leg to stand on!

C. Birds

1. Peacocks

2. Performing Plovers

David Attenborough’s acclaimed television series, The Life of Birds, provided many examples of remarkable features and behaviors in birds. These provide excellent reasons to doubt the evolutionary philosophy permeating the whole series. Let’s look at just two.

Many species of the plover (sub-family Charadrinnae) exhibit a most remarkable behavior. Their nests, lined with grass and leaves, are usually made in a depression on the ground or simply in long grass. When sitting on her eggs, the female is almost invisible until one draws very close. If an intruder such as a hawk or fox is in the area, the bird will remain dead still until the last minute.

If it seems likely the intruder will discover the nest, the bird will suddenly rear up and run in a seemingly disorganized pattern, thus distracting the attention of the invader away from the nest, the eggs, or the chicks. As it runs, the plover begins to apparently stumble and struggle as if it has a broken leg or a broken wing, giving the impression it is disabled and defenseless.

But this performance is anything but random. As she stumbles around, the mother bird steadily and imperceptibly works her way ever further from the nest, drawing the intruder after her with the lure of an easy meal. Within a minute or two the plover is many meters away from her nest. If attacked, she will magically ‘recover’ and fly off to a distance, watching the invader closely. When the intruder has departed, the mother bird returns to the nest.

3. Storks

Storks (family Ciconiidae) make their nests of sticks, reeds and grass, in tall trees. When the chicks hatch, their thin, featherless skin is extremely vulnerable to the direct rays of the sun. The parent bird has two responses to the high temperature problem—if water is nearby, the stork fills its large beak, returns to the nest, and douses the tiny chicks with cooling water. If this is not sufficient, the parent then performs a most remarkable feat—it stands over the young and spreads its large wings over the entire nest, thus shading the chicks from the sun’s rays! Often it will do this for hours at a time.

4. Evolutionary problem with these behaviors

It is, of course, not plausible that birds, with their tiny brains, reason these sorts of behaviors out for themselves. Such behaviors are automatic and triggered by the appropriate circumstances. How and when did plovers and storks acquire these remarkable abilities?

There are only two real possibilities—one is that the programming for this behavior was in the genetic code right from the beginning, from the first of each of the respective kinds.

The other is time plus chance: natural selection, ‘choosing’ from the alternatives thrown up by random inherited copying mistakes, has, in a blind unthinking way, programmed this behavior over millions of years.

Evolutionary ‘just so’ stories are notoriously difficult to put to any sort of test. One would have to believe in an incredibly fortuitous series of mutations having to occur in the right sequence and at the right time.

The obvious alternative seems much more logical and plausible: just as a computer requires a designer and builder, so this remarkable programmed behavior required the existence of intelligence above and beyond itself. The Bible points to this intelligence—the Creator God.

5. Bird lung

Dr Denton agrees that natural (as well as artificial) selection is capable of generating some change in living things. But he says it is ‘completely incapable of accounting for the broad picture, the complex adaptations required by the tree of life’.

First, the nature of mutation (accidental changes in the genetic material of living things). He says that the ‘essential bedrock of Darwinism’ is the belief that ‘all the organisms which have existed throughout history were generated by the accumulation of entirely undirected mutations’. In his professional opinion, ‘that is an entirely unsubstantiated belief for which there is not the slightest evidence whatsoever’.

The second problem he sees is that there is ‘a huge number of highly complex systems in nature which cannot be plausibly accounted for in terms of a gradual build-up of small random mutations’.

Indeed, he says, ‘in many cases there does not exist in the biological literature even an attempt to explain how these things have come about’. A classic example, he says, is the lung of the bird, which is ‘unique in being a circulatory lung rather than a bellows lung [see box]. I think it doesn’t require a great deal of profound knowledge of biology to see that for an organ which is so central to the physiology of any higher organism, its drastic modification in that way by a series of small events is almost inconceivable. This is something we can’t throw under the carpet again because, basically, as Darwin said, if any organ can be shown to be incapable of being achieved gradually in little steps, his theory would be totally overthrown.

‘The fact is that, in common-sense terms, if you have no axe to grind, there are a vast number of such cases in nature.’ Michael Denton, a recognized academic in his field, says that the claim that Darwinian gradualism ‘can generate the sorts of complex systems we see throughout the biosphere is not only unsubstantiated, but in many cases it is actually beyond the realm of common sense that such things would ever happen’.

Diagram of a bird's lung
and air sac system, and countercurrent exchange

As a bird breathes, air moves into its rear air sacs (1). These then expel the air into the lung (2) and the air flows through the lung into the front air sacs (3). The air is expelled by the front air sacs as the bird breathes out. The lung does not expand and contract as does a reptile’s or mammal’s. The blood which picks up oxygen from the lung flows in the opposite direction to the air so that blood with the lowest oxygen (blue in the diagram always means lower oxygen, red means high oxygen) is exposed to air with the lowest oxygen. The blood with the highest oxygen is exposed to air with an even higher oxygen concentration. This ensures that, in every region of the circulation, the concentration of oxygen in the air is more than that of the blood with which it is in contact. This maximizes the efficiency of oxygen transfer from the air to the blood. This is known as counter-current exchange. Such very efficient lungs help birds to handle the energy demands of flight, especially at high altitudes.¹

The reptile lung, like ours, has an in-out bellows-like arrangement and does not have the counter-current circulation system. In a mammalian lung (right), the air goes into sacs called alveoli (singular alveolus). Reptiles and birds possess septate lungs. A reptile lung is rather like a giant single alveolus, with ingrowths called septae that divide the lung into spatial units called faviculae or faveoli. The septae are rich in blood vessels, so oxygen exchange occurs there.

Diagram of a mammal's lung, showing alveoli

For a reptile lung to change into a bird lung by small steps, while remaining functional throughout and providing a greater advantage at each step, defies imagination, according to Dr Michael Denton, an open-minded evolutionist. For example, a transitional series from the reptile to the bird lung design would need to start from a poor creature with a diaphragmatic hernia (hole in the diaphragm), and natural selection would work against this. John Ruben, an evolutionary respiratory physiology expert at Oregon State University in Corvallis, argues:

‘Recently, conventional wisdom has held that birds are direct descendants of theropod dinosaurs. However, the apparently steadfast maintenance of hepatic-piston diaphragmatic lung ventilation in theropods throughout the Mesozoic poses a fundamental problem for such a relationship. The earliest stages in the derivation of the avian abdominal air sac system from a diaphragmatic-ventilating ancestor would have necessitated selection for a diaphragmatic hernia [i.e. hole] in taxa transitional between theropods and birds. Such a debilitating condition would have immediately compromised the entire pulmonary ventilatory apparatus and seems unlikely to have been of any selective advantage.’

6. Flight

Many of our textbooks suggest that it is man's superior intelligence which has enabled our species to modify the environment by technological innovations and so give us some control of our evolution. Increasing technological advance is seen as our salvation in the struggle to survive.

However, these texts do not suggest that our technology was achieved by accident. It is accepted as the result of applied intelligence building on the achievement of earlier generations. Animal behavior is the result of inbuilt responses to external stimuli, allied with a limited ability to learn from experience. While some animals make limited use of tools, none approaches man's ability to design and innovate. Yet when we look at the way in which animals are suited to their environment, we find that many animals have inbuilt devices which far surpass the technological achievements of which man is so proud.

Take flight, for instance. Thoresen (1971) claims that if a small aeroplane were as efficient as the plover, it would fly 56 km on one liter of gasoline. Birds show excellent aerodynamic design.

No one of these features enables flight. It is only when they are put together that birds fly. Each feature could not evolve separately to its current perfection and then unite harmoniously with the other.

Flying patterns in the animal kingdom include power flying, gliding, soaring and flight like the helicopter of humming birds and dragonflies. Each has special variations for its specific mode of flight.

It is of interest to note that our planes, helicopters and gliders, designed with purpose, cannot match the design standards observed in animals following innate behavior patterns.

D. Gecko

It’s quite a sight to see geckos, small tropical lizards, running up and down walls and across ceilings, without any trouble. But what makes their feet stick? Several plausible ideas have been disproved:

· Suction? Suction caps work because air pressure on one side is no longer counterbalanced if there is a vacuum on the other. Because normal air pressure is 100 kPa (kilopascals), or 14 pounds per square inch, suction can be very effective. But geckos’ feet can stick in a vacuum where there is no air pressure, so suction cannot be the reason.

· Electrostatic attraction? This is the attraction between electrically charged objects, for example a plastic comb rubbed with cloth can pick up small pieces of paper. But when researchers zapped the surrounding air with X-rays to form charged molecules (ions), which would cause any charge to leak away, the feet still stuck.

· Interlocking between rough surfaces? Geckos can even stick to polished glass.

The best explanation seems to be that the geckos’ feet can exploit the weak short-range bonds between molecules.¹ That is, they stick via van der Waals forces.² But for such weak forces to work, there must be an enormous intimate contact area between foot and surface, so that enough individual weak forces can add up to a very strong force.

Under an electron microscope, researchers have found that the feet have very fine hairs (setae), about 1/10^th of a millimeter long and packed 5,000 per square mm (three million per square inch). In turn, the end of each seta has about 400–1,000 branches ending in a spatula-like structure about 0.2–0.5 µm (microns—less than 1/50,000^th inch) long. These spatulae can provide the necessary contact area.

With special instruments,³ a team of biologists and engineers from several American universities analyzed a seta from the foot of a Tokay gecko (gecko). The foot pad has an area of about 100 mm² (0.16 sq. inch) and can produce 10 newtons of adhesive force (enough to support two pounds). But they showed that an individual seta had an attractive force 10 times stronger than expected. In fact, one seta is strong enough to support an ant’s weight, while a million could support a small child. So the gecko has plenty of attractive force to spare. This means it can handle the rough, irregular surfaces of its natural habitat.

Actually, the attractive force is far greater when the seta is gently pressed into the surface and then pulled along. The force also changes with the angle at which the hair is attached to the surface, so that the seta can detach at about 30°. These elaborate properties are exploited by the gecko’s ‘unusually complex behaviour’¹ of uncurling its toes when attaching, and unpeeling while detaching. This all means that the gecko can not only stick properly with each step, but also avoid getting stuck, all without using much energy.

Another amazing feature is that the gecko’s feet are self-cleaning—unlike sticky tape, to which dirt easily sticks, rendering it useless. The researchers are still trying to find out how geckos manage that.

One evolutionist said: ‘It’s great to look at how evolution has solved mechanical problems’.⁴ But he never said how evolution, via chance mutations and natural selection, could have produced the complex foot structure as well as the movement pattern needed to use the structure properly. For example, there was no explanation of how half-formed setae and spatulae and an imperfect movement would benefit the animal and thus be selected for. This seems more like blind faith for people who have ruled out a Designer by decree.

But is this legitimate? The researchers commented that designing such a structure is ‘beyond the limits of human technology’,¹ especially finding a material that can be split so finely 1,000 times. If the structure is ‘beyond the limits of human technology’, then it’s reasonable to believe that it was designed by One whose intelligence is beyond our own.

They also pointed out that the ‘natural technology of gecko foot hairs can provide biological inspiration for future design of a remarkably effective adhesive’.¹ In fact, giving robots sticky feet and getting them to walk the way geckos do (with the uncurling/unpeeling action) has made ‘champion climbers’ out of two robots.⁵ Dr Autumn also commented: ‘Geckos can do things that we just can’t do with current robotics and adhesive technology.’⁶

So not only can we not design anything as complex as the gecko’s foot, human designers are learning new things from it. This speaks of a Master Designer of the foot, who programmed the complex ‘recipe’ for the foot, as well as the movement patterns, into the gecko’s DNA.

E. Spiders

1. Trap Door Spider

2. Orb Spider

3. Bolo Spider

F. Insects

1. Locusts

It has often been said that, according to the laws of aerodynamics, insects shouldn’t be able to fly. But of course they do — brilliantly. Actually, that only highlighted our ignorance of aerodynamics. Research over the past few years is revealing how insects do manage to fly in ways which put the achievements and maneuverability of our most advanced aircraft to shame.

Conventional analysis showed that insects were generating only about one-half to one-third of the lift needed to carry their weight. However, ingenious experiments have now shown unexpected patterns of vortex flow along the edges of insect wings.

These generate the extra lift needed because the vortex (a spiraling tube-like pattern of airflow like a mini-tornado) stays ‘stuck’ to the leading edge of the wing for long enough.¹ At this point, no one knows how or why this particular vortex phenomenon occurs, but researchers have been able to see it in a robot model of a moth’s wing inside a wind tunnel.

One reason why previous models failed to detect how insects could fly is that they used fixed wings. However, insect wings have a very complex motion, rotating and changing the camber. It required sophisticated programming to make the ‘robot insect’ flap properly. This demonstrates how sophisticated the (created) design of actual insect flight must be.

2. Walking Upside Down

How do ants and bees walk upside down, an essential skill for walking on plants? Not only must their feet be able to stick, but also become unstuck at the right time so they can move quickly.

A University of Massachusetts team has now shown the amazing way they do this, using high-speed photography on honeybees and weaver ants walking on glass, and studying the foot structure under a microscope. The foot has a moist pad (arolium), which can stick to a surface like wet paper to a window. This is between two claws, shaped like a bull’s horns.

If the surface is rough, the claws can catch onto a surface, and the arolium is retracted because it’s not needed, and is protected from abrasion. But on a smooth surface where the claws can’t catch onto anything, they retract via the claw flexor tendon, which also causes the arolium to rotate and extend into position. This tendon also connects to a plate that squeezes a reservoir of ‘blood’ (hemolymph), forcing the liquid into the arolium to inflate it, so it presses on the surface.

When the foot needs to become unstuck, the claw flexor tendon is released, and the arolium and many of the mechanical parts are so elastic that they quickly spring back into place. The same basic mechanism applies to both bees and ants, but they have some differently shaped parts because of their different requirements.

This is a very complex mechanical and hydraulic design, but controlled very simply, without any brain input. This enables high reliability and very fast reaction times. Not surprisingly, this has intrigued designers of miniature robots for medical purposes.

G. Bears

From the thick stomach lining of the panda and the partially webbed paws of the polar bear, to the insect-sucking muzzle of the sloth bear, bears provide a fascinating example of the variety of specialized characteristics existing within one family.

The bear family (Ursidae) consists of eight species, four of which are contained in the Ursus group: the brown bear, American black bear, Asiatic black bear and polar bear. Even within this group (known as a genus) the variation is wide.

The brown and American black bears are mainly vegetarians with appropriate dental features for crushing plant material. However, the first has claws suited to digging while the other has claws more suitable for climbing. The Asiatic black bear, which also has claws for climbing, is an opportunistic omnivorous feeder (eating meat and plants as available).¹

The polar bear, however, has some amazing features which allow it to function perfectly in its cold, wet environment. Much heavier than the above bears, it has two distinct hair types, one long and one short, which effectively is like having two coats. By increasing buoyancy, this helps it to swim, as does its long neck and the partial webbing between its toes. Its fur-covered foot pads provide better traction on the ice. Almost exclusively a meat eater (with teeth to suit such a diet), the polar bear also has a large stomach capacity for sporadic (opportunistic) feeding.

The sun bears and sloth bears (also included in the Ursus group by many scientists) also have as many differences as similarities. The sun bear is omnivorous, with sharp, sickle-like claws suited for tree climbing, while the sloth bear (possessing claws for both digging and tree climbing) has an unusual head and dental structure perfect for eating its main food source, termites. The sloth bear’s long muzzle has protrusible lips and nostrils which it can close — these two features allow it to create a vacuum tube to suck up the termites.

The giant panda, like the polar bear, has very specialized features necessary for survival, including powerful jaws and special molars for crushing plants, and an oesophagus (gullet) with a tough, horny lining to protect the bear from splinters when it eats bamboo, its primary source of food. The panda’s stomach also has a thick, muscular lining to protect it from bamboo fragments.

While both evolutionists and creationists consider these specialized characteristics to be adaptations to the environment through natural selection, the two camps are poles apart as to how most of this variation came about in the first place.

Evolutionists believe that the genetic (hereditary) information (which supplies the ‘recipe’ to construct such specialized features in the developing embryo) all arose by an accumulation of copying errors (mutations). Any ‘good’ errors which helped the creature to survive were passed on. In this way, they believe that these design features are all the result of these copying mistakes, accumulated by selection over millions of years.

Creationists, however, while accepting that all of today’s bears probably descended from a single bear kind,² do not believe that the information in the ‘recipes’ for all these design features arose by chance. No-one has ever observed any biological process adding information!

A better explanation is that virtually all the necessary information was already there in the genetic makeup of the first bears, a population created by God with vast genetic potential for variation.

This doesn’t mean that all of the features of today’s bears would have been on obvious display back then. A simple example would be the way in which mongrel dogs obviously had the potential to develop all the different breeds we see today. Thus, there was no actual poodle to be seen among mongrel dogs hundreds of years ago, but by looking closely at many of them, one would have seen at least some of the individual features found in today’s poodles popping up here and there.

H. Bees

Imagine you are a honeybee. You leave your hive one fine spring morning and scout around until you notice a field full of new flowers in bloom. The food back in your hive, which the 15,000 bees in your colony have fed on through the winter, has been getting low. But now, in this field, you have found a new food supply. So you fill your special honey stomach with nectar and fly the 250 meters back to your hive.

The other bees do not yet know where to find the blooms you have discovered. Your brain is only the size of a pinhead, but it is obvious that if you are to fully utilize this new food source you will need help. Before summer arrives, your colony could number more than 80,000 bees. But the little bit of pollen and nectar you would collect in each trip could see your colony starve before each member was fed. So how do you tell the other bees in your hive where to find the blossoms you have discovered?

In the early 1900s, Austrian naturalist Karl von Frisch puzzled over this curious problem. Fascinated with the ways honeybees worked together, von Frisch began a deep study of them. He found that one of the most remarkable characteristics of bees is the way they communicate. In fact, bees have one of the most extraordinary means of communication in the insect world. Von Frisch discovered that bees express themselves not only by feeling and tasting, but also by dancing.

To identify the location of a food source too distant from the hive to be smelled or seen by the other bees, the scout does a dance on the honeycomb inside the hive. Other bees gather around and closely follow the dancer. They imitate her movements (all dancing worker bees are female), and note the fragrance on her of the flowers from which the dancer gathered the nectar.

If the new food source is nearby, say within about 50 meters of the hive, the bee does a circular dance on the surface of the honeycomb. She moves around two or three centimeters (an inch or so), then circles in the opposite direction. This tells the other bees the food is close by. The scent they detect on her alerts them to what the new food smells like. So the other bees leave the hive and fly around in ever-widening circles until they find the new supply of flowers.

If the new source of nectar or pollen is distant, the scout makes an ingenious alteration to her dance. She dances the shape of a ‘figure eight’, with intermittent movements across the middle of the figure. The distance at which the changeover takes place, from round dance to figure eight, varies among different types of bees. This does not cause them confusion, for the distance is constant within each hive.

Every movement by the scout has meaning for the other bees. They can tell the distance of the food source by the number of times the dancer circles during a given interval, and also by her wiggling abdomen. The greater the distance, the more slowly she wiggles. The direction of the food is revealed by the direction and angle the dancing bee cuts across the circle. If she wiggles across the circle straight up, the watching bees know they will find the food by flying towards the sun. If she cuts the circle straight down, they know they have to fly away from the sun.

If the dancing bee cuts across the circle at an angle, the other bees know they must fly to the right or left of the sun at the same angle the dancer moved to the right or left of an imagined vertical line.

This dazzling display of the honeybee dancers is truly a striking feature of the insect world. When we consider the complicated steps of the dance, and the detailed information conveyed and understood through it by all the world’s honeybees (von Frisch took 20 years to decipher it), we are entitled to strongly doubt that this process could ever evolve.

Let’s try to imagine the system evolving. A bee discovers a field in bloom. She returns to her hive and no one else knows where she filled her honey stomach. She can’t tell them herself, so the hive has to wait until individual bees haphazardly chance upon the same field, or she has to keep going back and forward hoping someone will follow her. Even worse, she may not remember how to get back to the field herself!

Now let’s suppose that one day an enterprising bee manages to invent the dance. How would she communicate to the others what it meant? How could she ever explain the geometry involved—that the angle she walks across the diameter of the circle is equal to the angle between the sun and the food source? What if the sun goes down before the other bees understand? How does she explain she has invented one dance for a food supply nearby, and another for a supply a long distance away?

How does she tell them that if she wiggles very slowly it means the field is very distant, and if she wiggles very fast it means the field is not far? How will they know that if the dancer walks up the honeycomb they should fly towards the sun, but if she walks down they must fly in the opposite direction?

Even more important, if this process slowly evolved over a long time, how would all the bee ancestors have survived while this system of communication was evolving? If they survived without this complicated method, why invent a new system that would be almost impossible to explain?

Among the wonders of God’s creation, the honeybee provides some startling evidences against evolution, and for design and purpose by the Creator. The precisely coordinated language used for the bee’s survival has too many necessary and independent parts for such a system to have evolved. We are forced by logic and common sense to conclude that the whole process was implanted in bees at the time of their creation. Like the bees, it did not and could not evolve.

The dance of the figure eight is also used when bees are selecting a new homesite. Under certain conditions, such as overcrowding, the queen may leave with part of the colony to search for a new home. She leaves behind one or more queen cells from which a new queen will hatch. The old queen and her swarm first congregate somewhere, such as on a branch of a tree. Worker bees are then sent to scout around for a suitable new homesite. Any scout who finds a potential site returns to the others and tells them where her favored site is by doing the ‘figure eight’ dance on the surface of the cluster of bees.

Other bees inspect each site and return to the colony to tell the others what they ‘think’ of it. The vigor of their dancing reflects their reactions to the suitability of the site. Finally, after perhaps several days of house-hunting, one of the sites gains overwhelming favor and the swarm moves off to start a new hive there.

One researcher watched this dance contest for four days, noting directions and distances of potential sites. He worked out the site which was rapidly gaining favor, then hurried off to find it. He arrived at the new dwelling-place before even the bees did!

Such complicated communication seems impossible to explain if you believe bees and their language have evolved.

I. Peacocks

The peacock tail contains spectacular beauty because of the large feathers, bright, iridescent colors and intricate patterns. The colors in the tail feathers are produced by an optical effect called thin-film interference. The eye pattern has a high degree of brightness and precision because the color-producing mechanisms contain an extremely high level of optimum design. According to the theory of sexual selection, the peacock tail has gradually evolved because the peahen selects beautiful males for mating. However, there is no satisfactory explanation of how the sexual selection cycle can start or why the peahen should prefer beautiful features. In addition, there is irreducible complexity in both the physical structure of the feather and in the beautiful patterns.

Most birds have two types of tail feather: flight feathers and tail-coverts. The flight feathers provide stability during flight, while the tail-coverts ‘cover’ and protect the tail region. In the vast majority of birds, the tail-coverts are small feathers, just a few centimeters long. However, some birds like the peacock have very large tail-coverts for decorative purposes. These decorative feathers are also referred to as ornamental feathers, or display feathers.¹ It should be noted that a peacock is a male peafowl and a peahen is a female peafowl. The peahen does not have any decorative feathers.

When a peacock displays his tail feathers during courtship, a magnificent ‘fan formation’ of feathers forms a beautiful backdrop to the body of the peacock as shown in Figure 1 (below). An adult peacock has an average of 200 tail feathers and these are shed and re-grown annually. Of the 200 or so feathers, about 170 are ‘eye’ feathers and 30 are ‘T’ feathers. The ‘eyes’ are sometimes referred to as ocellations.

J. Fan formation of displayed feathers

When the peacock feathers are displayed there are several beautiful features that can be seen:

· Fan formation of feathers

· Uniform distribution of ‘eyes’

· Intricate ‘eye’ feathers

· Intricate ‘T’ feathers

One reason for the beauty of the displayed feathers is that they form a semi-circular fan over an angle of more than 180 degrees. The fan formation is very even because the axis of every feather can be projected back to an approximately common geometrical center. The radial alignment of feathers requires the root of each feather to be pointed with a remarkable degree of accuracy. Another remarkable feature of the displayed feathers is that they are ‘deployed’ into position by muscles in the peacock’s tail. Not only can the peacock deploy the feathers, but he can also make them vibrate and produce a characteristic hum.

Another beautiful feature of the displayed feathers is the uniform spacing of the eyes. Even though the display contains around 170 eye feathers, they are all visible and all spaced apart with a remarkable degree of uniformity. All the eyes are visible because the feathers are layered with the short feathers at the front and the longer feathers at the back. The eyes have an even spacing because each feather has the right length.

Each ‘eye’ feather and ‘T’ feather is an object of outstanding beauty in itself. The eyes contain beautiful patterns, and the ‘T’-shaped feathers form a beautiful border to the fan.

K. The eye feather

Figure 2 (right) shows a sketch of the top section of the eye feather. There are several beautiful features to the feather:

· Intricate eye pattern

· Loose barbs below the eye pattern

· Absence of stem in the top half of eye pattern

· Narrow stem in the bottom half of eye pattern

· Brown coating of the stem near the eye pattern

The bright colors and intricate shapes of the eye pattern are the most striking aesthetic features. The loose barbs on the lower part of the feather are beautiful because they make a contrast with the neatness and precision of the barbs in the eye pattern.

The last three features in the list above are usually only noticed by very careful observers. However they represent important ‘finishing touches’ which make an important contribution to the beauty of the feather. The absence of a stem in the top half of the eye is an important detail because it prevents the pattern from being divided into two sections. The stem is not needed because the barbs fan out around the top of the feather. The narrowness of the stem in the bottom half of the eye pattern is important because this makes the stem fairly obscure. The stem can be narrow because it has a deep section in the area of the eye pattern. The brown coating of the stem in the area of the eye pattern is very important because the stem is a natural white color and this would be too conspicuous for the eye pattern. It is interesting to note that the stem is white everywhere except local to the eye pattern. This strongly indicates that the brown coating near the eye pattern is a deliberate feature.

A large eye feather has been examined at Bristol University to determine the number and size of each part of the feather. The number and size of barbules was estimated by examining sample sections of barbs with a microscope. The data for the feather are summarized as follows:

L. The colors in the eye feather

The colors in the peacock tail are particularly beautiful because they are bright and iridescent. An iridescent color is a color that changes with the angle of view. The colors are not produced by pigments but by an optical effect called thin-film interference that takes place in the barbules.⁴ In technical terms, the peacock has ‘structural colors’.

In the eye pattern, the barbules appear bronze, blue, dark purple and green. Away from the eye region, the barbules are uniformly green. The colors in the eye feather can only be seen on the front surface of the feather because this is where the barbules are positioned. The back of the feather is uniformly brown because the barbs contain a brown pigment. To understand how thin-film interference is produced in the peacock tail, it is first necessary to understand the detailed structure of the feather.

M. Structure of the barbules

The basic structure of the peacock tail feather in the eye region is shown in Figure 3(a) (right). For comparison, the structure of a typical flight feather is shown in Figure 3(b) (right). Like the flight feather, the peacock tail feather has a central stem with an array of barbs on each side. Also, individual barbs have an array of barbules on each side of the barb. Even though there is a basic similarity with a flight feather, the peacock tail feather has an unusual barbule structure. The barbules are like long flat ribbons that overlap to form a flat surface on top of the barbs. (Under a microscope the barbules are actually slightly curved and segmented and the surface has a bubbly appearance). In contrast, a flight feather has narrow barbules which do not cover the barbs. Other types of birds such as hummingbirds, pigeons and kingfishers have some patches of flat iridescent barbules, but the peacock has the largest iridescent barbules of any known bird.⁵

The colors of the barbules dominate the front face of the tail feather because they completely cover the barbs. The barbules are not very visible from the back of the feather because the barbs are quite close together.

N. Thin-film interference in the barbules

Thin-film interference can be produced in one or more layers of a very thin and transparent material. Usually the thin film is placed on a dark surface. The thickness of the transparent material must be close to the wavelengths of visible light. Visible colors have wavelengths between 0.4 and 0.8 µ and thin films typically have a thickness of between 0.3 and 1.5 µ. Another requirement for thin-film interference is that the thin film must have a refractive index that differs from air so that the light is retarded when it passes through the thin film. Thin-film interference commonly occurs in oil slicks on a wet road. The oil will often form a thin layer on the wet surface of the road or on the surface of a puddle, the thin-film producing blue and green colors.

In the case of the peacock, thin film interference takes place in three layers of keratin which cover the barbules as shown in Figure 4. Each barbule is about 60 µ wide and 5 µ thick.⁶ The barbules have a foam core that is 2 µ thick and this is covered with three layers of keratin on each side, as shown in Figure 4 (below). The keratin layers are very thin, being about 0.4–0.5 µ thick.⁷

The principle of thin-film interference in a single layer of keratin is shown in Figure 4. White light is reflected off the front and back surfaces of the thin film. The light which passes through the keratin is retarded and therefore when it emerges from the keratin, some of the color components of white light are out of phase with the light-waves that were reflected from the front surface. When two wave trains of the same color are out of phase, destructive interference removes the color. In the case of white light, the result of the interference is a reflected color due to the remaining color components of white light. In practice, interference occurs simultaneously in all three thin films.

The only pigment in the peacock tail is melanin, which gives the barbs a uniform brown color. This provides a dark background color for the thin-film interference in the keratin layers. The different colors in the eye pattern result from minute changes in the depth of thickness of the keratin layers.⁸ In order to produce a particular color, the keratin thickness must be accurate to within about 0.05 µm (one twenty thousandth of one millimeter!).

The barbules in the peacock feather contain a high degree of optimum design. The thickness of the keratin layers is optimal for producing the brightest thin-film colors. The dark brown background coloring is optimal because it prevents light shining through the back of the feather. The three layers add to the brilliance of the colors in the feather by adding multiple components of light. The barbules are also slightly curved in the longitudinal direction.⁹ This curvature causes a mingling of slightly different colors, which produces a softening of the colors seen in the keratin layers.⁹

O. The eye pattern

The particular beauty of the eye pattern comes from the rounded shapes that have a high degree of resolution as shown in Figure 5 (below). The ‘pupil’ of the eye is formed by a dark purple cardioid and the ‘iris’ is formed by a blue ellipsoid. These shapes are located within a pointed bronze ellipsoid that is surrounded by one or two green fringes.

A very important feature of the eye pattern is that it is a digital pattern which is formed by the combined effect of many thousands of individual barbules. Some patterns in nature are formed by natural growth mechanisms, as with the spiral shape of the nautilus shell. However, the eye pattern in the peacock tail requires the precise coordination of independent barbs and this cannot be achieved by a simple growth mechanism. Barbules on adjacent barbs coordinate perfectly with each other to produce the eye pattern.

The spacing of colors on each barb must be specified by instructions in the genetic code. To specify the pattern, there must be timing or positional instructions in the DNA which causes the right thickness of keratin to be grown on the right barbule and on the right barb. To help appreciate the precise nature of the information in the genetic code, it is helpful to consider the mathematical complexity involved in calculating the required spacing of colors on each barb.

P. Required color spacing on barbs

Figure 6 (right) shows the color spacing on a single barb. Along the first part of barb ‘n’, the thickness of the keratin films on the barbules gives a bronze color. Then an abrupt and minute change in thickness of the keratin films produces a blue color. Another abrupt and minute change in thickness of the keratin films so produces a bronze color. The abrupt nature of the changes in thickness is important because if the changes were gradual then there would be a gradual change in colour.¹⁰ The abrupt changes in thickness of keratin along a barb are an amazing feature because it involves sudden and precise changes in the dimensions of the barbule. Even more amazingly, along the length of the barb the thickness of the keratin does not continually get thicker and thicker (or thinner and thinner) but it involves both increases and decreases in thickness.

A similar procedure can be used for the intersection points on the cardioid shape and the outer green fringes. For each barb there are on average about four points at which color changes and so there are on average four positions to calculate. Since there are around 50 barbs on each side of the pattern and since every one of these barbs has a unique spacing of color, it is necessary to calculate 200 intersection points in order to construct the whole eye pattern.

The long ‘T’ border feathers provide a beautiful border to the tail feathers because they form an inverse shape to the peacock eye as shown in Figure 7 (below). An inverse shape is beautiful because the inside profile of the T feather follows the outline of the eye pattern. The T feathers often form an ‘ogee’ curve on each side of the feather as shown in Figure 7. An ogee curve is beautiful because it is both concave and convex. For this reason, ogee curves are used in architecture in structures such as arches. The formation of an ogee curve from individual barbs is yet another remarkable feature of the peacock tail. Each barb at the end of the T feather has a unique length and curvature and all the barbs coordinate exactly with each other to form the curved T.

Q. Information content in the genetic code

Every detail in the peacock tail must be defined by genes in the genetic code of the peafowl. Since the tail feathers have very complicated structures and color-producing mechanisms, there must be a large amount of design information in the genetic code.

It is difficult to determine how many genes would be required to specify the aesthetic features of a peacock tail feather because it is not known how the tail feather grows. However, a conservative estimate can be made by assuming that each separate aesthetic feature is specified by one gene. By assuming that each color and each shape within the eye pattern represents a separate feature, and taking into account the other features discussed in this paper, the total number of aesthetic features in a single feather comes to about 20. Therefore an estimated 20 genes are required for the peacock tail. This may be a very conservative estimate. In particular, it may be that many genes are required to produce each shape in the eye pattern since the eye pattern is formed from the coordinated arrangement of over 100 barbs. In addition, the fanning-out of barbs in the top of the feather, where there is no stem, is a complex feature that may well need several controlling genes.

Even if only 20 genes are required to specify the beautiful features of the peacock tail, this still amounts to a lot of genetic information. A gene typically consists of 1,000 chemical units of information (base pairs). Therefore, 20 genes would contain many thousands of chemical units of information. According to evolutionists, all of this information has appeared gradually by genetic mistakes and by sexual selection.

I. Lessons From the Animals

A. Design

B. Care

1. If God cares for the sparrows then He definitely cares for us

C. Talking Animals in Scripture

1. Serpent in the garden

2. Balaam’s ass

D. Lessons from the talkers above

1. Miracles can be done by the wicked as well as the righteous

2. Miracles in and of themselves are not an indication of whether a person is of God

3. The ultimate determiner of righteousness and godliness and correctness is Scripture.

4. Following a miracle worker can get you in big trouble

II. Amazing Animals

A. Whale