The Platypus

The Platypus

If any creature superficially resembled the long coveted missing link in the evolution of animals, it would be the platypus. Instead, this creature leaves the evolutionists scratching their heads, wondering where to put it on their tree of relatives. Though a mammal, it has characteristics of birds and lizards. For example, the platypus lays leathery eggs and yet it suckles its young. It lives in burrows and finds food in the rivers using electrical impulses, similar to some fish. The male platypus has a ½ inch spur on his hind legs that can inject poison like a snake. It has a very sensitive bill like a duck but feet like an otter. In fact, the name platypus means flat-footed.

The platypus is found on eastern coast of Australia but more common in the south where flooding and crocodiles are not as common. The female breeds at age two but may not do so every year. The platypus grows to about 20 inches and can live for up to 12 years in captivity. It is able to maintain its 90ºF body temperature even while swimming for food at water temperatures close to freezing. This is done by increasing its metabolism with the additional help of waterproof fur and its ability to direct the blood flow to areas of greatest need. “The outer hair is dark brown on its back and yellowish on its underside. Under this outer hair, which is long and coarse, there is a fine, dense under-fur which has a similar feel to wool and ranges in color from grey to dark brown.” (http://www.platypus.org.uk)
The tail of the platypus somewhat resembles that of a beaver but is really quite different. The beaver’s tail is flatter, broader and covered with special scales, and it is used to help the animal build dams and warn of danger. The platypus’ tail is mainly made of a fatty tissue that is used to store energy supplies for times of need. The top is covered by coarse hairs, whereas underneath there is only a sparse growth of hair. Unlike the beaver, the platypus uses its tail only for steering while swimming.
The front feet of the platypus are webbed, suited perfectly for swimming by alternately kicking its front legs. Yet the claws look more like those of reptiles. The hind legs are only partially webbed and act as steering rudders.
Out of the water, a beaver is awkward and clumsy. Not so with the platypus. When out of the water, its webbing is folded under the animal’s feet that are then ideal for digging.
Since this creature is found only in Australia, evolutionists have surmised that it is the result of cross-breeding with close relatives. Yet, the ideally suited characteristics resembling a variety of animal classes defies such an explanation. Again, it is easiest to believe what God said, that He made the platypus in the beginning as it is, another perfect example of His creative genius!

Those Amazing Bats

We may not like them in our house, but we surely do like how bats benefit us. Bats are amazing creatures. They are the only flying mammal, and, with almost 1000 living bat species, account for nearly one-quarter of all mammal species. The smallest is the bumble bee bat with a wingspan of 6 inches and a weight of less than an ounce. The largest bat is the ‘flying fox’ in Asia with a wingspan of up to 6 feet and a weight of 2 pounds. Most bats roost (rest and sleep) hanging upside down by their hind feet that automatically lock them into position. Some bats hibernate, and some migrate. Bats can use their legs to walk, but cannot jump up and take off in flight from the ground; they must drop from a reasonable height to get started.
Bats give birth to live young, usually just one. Some caves may be home to millions of bats, yet when the parents return with supper, they can immediately find their own young. Bats have a hair coat with whiskers and even lose their baby teeth as they grow. Its lifespan ranges between 10 and 32 years, depending on the species.
Bats get a bad reputation because of vampire movies. Actually only the vampire bat likes blood. Most of the others chow down on inspects and lots of them.  One bat can eat 600-1,000 mosquito-sized insects in only one hour. A typical colony of 150 big brown bats can eat 33 million rootworms each summer. This really helps farmers! A long eared bat called the pallid bat can hear the walking insects like the grasshopper, scorpions, and centipedes and keep their population under control. Bats also help in pollinating, fertilizing, spreading seeds, and even in making certain drugs. Bats are so beneficial that, in some states it is against the law to exterminate them.
We have all heard the expression ‘blind as a bat’ but this is a misnomer. Bats are not blind and some bats see quite well. But insect eating bats do not rely on their eyes to locate prey. (After all, they are nocturnal.) For navigation and to find their food, they send out a sound and ‘listen’ for the echo. This is known as echolocation and is similar to radar. 
The bat produces a sound through its mouth that pulses at 50-60 times a second. The frequency is 30,000Hz or more, well beyond the human range of 20Hz to 20,000Hz. When the sound, traveling at 760mph, bounces off of an object, the bat is able to determine the nature, size, and location of the object by the return sounds that enter its large ears. By continuing to emit this sound, the bat nimbly zeros in on an insect and devours it.
Modern radar systems were invented after studying echolocation such as that of the bat. Yet, no one would claim a radar system happened by accident. How much more ridiculous it is to claim this for the prototype!

Survival of the Fakest

The last three articles have been leading up to these excerpts from the article, “Survival of the Fakest” by Jonathan Wells. It originally appeared in The American Spectator, December 2000/January 2001. The full text should be read and is available online from several sources. (Jonathan Wells holds a Ph.D. in molecular and cell biology from UC-Berkeley and has published widely in academic journals. He is author of the recently released Icons of Evolution (Regnery))

It was only when I was finishing my Ph.D. in cell and development biology, however, that I noticed what at first I took to be a strange anomaly. The textbook I was using prominently featured drawings of vertebrate embryos--fish, chickens, humans etc.--where similarities were presented as evidence for descent from a common ancestor. Indeed, the drawings did appear very similar. But I’d been studying embryos for some time looking at them under a microscope. And I knew that the drawings were just plain wrong. I re-checked all my other textbooks. They all had similar drawings, and they were all obviously wrong. Not only did they distort the embryos they pictured; they omitted earlier stages in which the embryos look very different from one another.
Like most other science students, like most scientists themselves, I let it pass. It didn’t immediately affect my work, and assumed that while the texts had somehow gotten this particular issue wrong, it was the exception to the rule. In 1997, however, my interest in the embryo drawings was revived when British embryologist Michael Richardson and his colleagues published the result of their study comparing the textbook drawings with actual embryos. As Richardson himself was quoted in the prestigious journal Science: “It looks like its turning out to be one of the most famous fakes in biology.”
Worse, this was no recent fraud. Nor was its discovery recent. The embryo drawings that appear in most every high school and college textbooks are either reproductions of, or based on, a famous series of drawings by the 19th century German biologist and fervent Darwinian, Ernst Haeckel, and they have been known to scholars of Darwin and evolutionary theory to be forgeries for over a hundred years. But none of them, apparently, have seen fit to correct this almost ubiquitous misinformation.
Still thinking this an exceptional circumstance, I became curious to see if I could find other mistakes in the standard biology texts dealing with evolution. My search revealed a startling fact however: Far from being exceptions, such blatant misrepresentations are more often the rule. . . We all remember them from biology class: the experiment that created the “building blocks of life” in a tube; the evolutionary “tree,” rooted in the primordial slime and branching out into animal and plant life. Then there were the similar bone structures of, say, a bird’s wing and a man’s hand, the peppered moths, and Darwin’s finches. And, of course, the Haeckel embryos.
As it happens, all of these examples, as well as many others purportedly standing as evidence of evolution, turn out to be incorrect. Not just slightly off. Not just slightly mistaken. On the subject of Darwinian evolution, the texts contained massive distortions and even some faked evidence. In fact, when the false “evidence” is taken away, the case for Darwinian evolution, in the textbooks at least, is so thin it’s almost invisible. (end of quote) If evolution needs distortions, half truths, and fakes to prove its veracity, we would logically conclude that said veracity doesn’t exist.

Evolution is True!

No, after writing over 100 articles sharing a little of the plethora of information supporting creation and design, I am not recanting. I must remain loyal to true science, to myself, and most of all, to God.
So what does this title mean? Dictionary.com lists 10 definitions for the word ‘evolution’, the first one being, “any process of formation or growth; development.” Synonyms include ‘unfolding’, ‘change’, ‘progression’, and ‘metamorphosis’. It always assumes improvement. We all believe that cars, washing machines, computers have evolved. However, creationists also believe in one form of biological evolution. It is called microevolution or adaptation. This simply means that God designed life to adapt to its changing environment. Penguins did not need survival skills in sub-zero temperatures before the flood, for example. The large variety of dogs today have resulted from cross-breading, either naturally or artificially. Animals that have not adapted have become extinct.
In fact, Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, first published in 1859, never actually dealt with the subject of the title! Instead, the book attempted to explain the wide variety of species by natural selection, something few Creationist’s deny. Just how many dogs, or horses, or whatever God made in the beginning we do not know. But we believe that, within each kind, a wide variety of adapting took place. This is microevolution. Through cross-breeding, we have made sweeter sweet corn, cows with more milk, and chickens and pigs with more meat. What no one has been able to do is to turn a reptile into a bird, or a bird into a mammal. Each kind has limits to the variety, limits that cannot be crossed. Thus, though we accept microevolution as a part of God’s design, we categorically deny macroevolution, the change from one kind of animal into another. This postulate has never been observed taking place even one time, anywhere. That it ever took place is pure conjecture.
The peppered moth is often used in textbooks as proof of macroevolution. Most major biology textbooks show, through pictures, how that the light colored moths were prevalent in England until the industrial revolution. Then the soot-covered trees highlighted the light colored moths. Gradually the dark colored peppered moths became more abundant because they blended with the background and were thus camouflaged from predators. This ‘proof’ of evolution has several problems. First, peppered moths don’t live on tree trunks! Those in the picture were glued there! Second, further study showed that dark moths also became prevalent in rural areas, far from the pollution. Apparently the environment had nothing to do with which color is dominant. Third, even if this change were caused by the environment, it at best demonstrates microevolution, adaptation to change, not change in form. Both colored moths were present before and after the industrial revolution pollution. Neither the peppered moth, nor any other change in form within a species is evidence that an animal has ever changed from one kind to another.

Does “Ontogeny recapitulate phylogeny”?

The title is a mouthful, isn’t it! Memorize that and spout it off when you want to impress people! Seriously, in the last article we talked about frauds and hoaxes used to prove evolution. This, it seems, is another example.
In 1874 Ernst Haeckel presented to the science world this series of drawings that, he claimed, proved that his theory of recapitulation was true. Simply put, the theory stated that, in the development of an embryo, the whole process of evolution is repeated for a species. Thus ontogeny (development of form) retraces the steps of phylogeny (evolutionary descent). Haeckel (1834-1919) was a scientist of impeccable credentials. “He was one of the first to consider psychology as a branch of physiology. He also proposed many now ubiquitous terms including ‘phylum’, ‘phylogeny’, ‘ecology’ and proposed the kingdom Protista.” (Wiki) “Today in the United States, Mount Haeckel, a 13,418 ft (4,090 m) summit in the Eastern Sierra Nevada, overlooking the Evolution Basin, is named in his honor, as is another Mount Haeckel, a 2,941 m (9,650 ft) summit in New Zealand; and the asteroid 12323 Häckel.” (Wiki)
This is all well and good, but the truth is, Haeckel’s drawings and theory were bogus. First, we know today that just because something is similar does not mean it is related. Genetically, none of these life forms have the same number of chromosomes as another and therefore, cross breading is impossible.
Further, even during Haeckel’s lifetime, his academic peers disciplined him “for adding and omitting features and fudging the scale ‘to exaggerate similarities among species.’ His drawings reduced the size of some embryos as much as ten times to make them look similar to other unrelated species.” (Jobe Martin, The Evolution of a Creationist, p. 214-215) In other words, he drew the pictures, not as he viewed the embryos, but in a way that would prove his theory. That is fraudulent! For example, he drew gill slits on mammals to prove relationship to fish. “Embryonic tissues that resemble ‘gill slits’ have nothing to do with breathing; they are not gills, and they are not slits. Instead, that embryonic tissue develops into parts of the face, bones of the middle ear, and endocrine glands.” (Walt Brown, In the Beginning, p. 9) Quotes from scientists denouncing the drawings are legion. “It is now firmly established that ontogeny does not repeat phylogeny,” said evolutionist George Gaylord Simpson, in Life: An Introduction to Biology. “Since then (when the theory was destroyed in 1921 by Walter Garstang), no respectable biologist has ever used the theory of recapitulation, because it was utterly unsound, created by a Nazi-like preacher named Haeckel.” So said Ashley Montagu. In short, evolutionists admit it was a fraudulent theory based on fraudulent drawings. Haeckel had a theory to prove, whether by fair means or fowl.
Yet consider this: in spite of this solid renunciation, the drawings have continued to be presented in biology textbooks as proof of evolution! I checked out my own high school Biology textbook published about 1960 and, sure enough, there they were as proof of physiological similarities between various animals. That is just plain dishonest, wouldn’t you admit? Further, “Michael K. Richardson, Professor of Evolutionary Developmental Zoology, Leiden University, while recognizing that some criticisms of the drawings are legitimate. . ., has supported the drawings as teaching aids, and has said that ‘on a fundamental level, Haeckel was correct.’” WIKI
All this strikes me as a desperate attempt to prove something (evolution) whose sound evidence is lacking. Inventing proof shouts the absence of truth.