Evolution: Trouble Times Four

Bombardier Beetle

One of life's little riddles is the bombardier beetle. As far as evolution is concerned, it's a tough nut to crack. This small insect has a very imposing chemical defense system. When threatened, it aims it's two abdomen tubes at its adversary, often an ant or spider. Then the bombardier fires off a series of miniature explosions peppering its victim with boiling acid. It is quite effective at keeping predators at bay.

What makes it work? The defense weapon is made of two storage glands, a combustion chamber, a couple of machine-gun type of swivel tubes, and of course the bombardier's expertise and instinct for using it. The chemicals are stored separately and are combined when used.

When combined, the toxic mixture is 25 percent hydrogen peroxide, 10 percent hydroquinone, water, and free oxygen plus enzymes which detonate the explosion. Of course, all of these chemicals must be stored, combined, and used in the right places, amounts, and concentrations. Otherwise, this little bug could easily blow itself into extinction or boil itself alive. The fact that it doesn't do either shows how well this insect is put together.

The bombardier controls, aims, and fires its chemical weapon through a series of specialized nerves and muscles. Each rapid explosion is heard as a "pop." Oxygen spews out a hot jet of steam and quinone solution under high pressure. It is a well-coordinated delivery system for firing droplets of boiling, burning acid at anyone who dares bother the bombardier beetle.

How did such an elaborate defense system come about? Every minute detail of it had to be programmed in the DNA.

Consider what is involved here: Storage compartments, combination chamber, separate chemicals and enzymes, the intake of exact amounts of water and oxygen, plus hundreds of nerves, muscles, and fibers intricately woven into a working system. All of these items are coded and integrated into the bombardier's DNA.

To say that this extraordinary defense system resulted from a series of errors is not a reasonable conclusion. It's on the same level as saying a jig-saw puzzle of a thousand pieces happened, by sheer accident, to fit together perfectly forming a complete mosaic.

That's asking too much of an accident or any series of accidents. Someone with intelligence put the puzzle together; likewise, Someone with intelligence put together the bombardier beetle.

There is another reason for doubting the evolution of such a complex defense system. Predators would not have allowed it. Can you imagine ants, spiders, and praying mantis idly standing by for millions of years patiently waiting for mutations to gradually perfect the bombardier's defense? No?

Given the opportunity, you can be sure, predators would have devoured this otherwise helpless little bug into extinction. Thus we are compelled to say, the bombardier's chemical defense system in all of its complexity had to come onboard, intact as a single unit. It was designed.

Millipede Apheloria Corrugata

What's true of the bombardier is also true of the millipede Apheloria corrugata who shoots hydrogen cyanide at its enemies. Again incremental steps are not practical. The only reasonable explanation for these complex, integrated chemical defenses is design - design by Someone with an in-depth knowledge of physics, chemistry, biology, and microbiology.

Darwin Quote on Eye and Natural Selection

Next let's consider the eye. Here is where the rubber meets the road. This is the acid test for evolution. Darwin recognized the problem and mentioned it in the Origin of the Species: "To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree."

Who can argue with that?

Vision

This is what we know about human vision: Light enters the eye through the transparent window called the cornea which covers the pupil. The pupil is an opening in the iris, the colored part of the eye. Light continues through the aqueous humor, a watery substance, until it lands upon the lens. The lens in turn focuses the light on the retina.

On the way to the retina, light must travel through the vitreous humor, a transparent jelly which fills out the center of the eye, helping it to keep its shape. When light hits the retina, it stimulates up to 137 million specialized cells know as rods and cones. (Cones are the color detectors; rods are the black and white detectors.)

Both rods and cones are chemical switch receptors. Light triggers these miniature on-off buttons generating as estimated one billion nerve impulses per second. The mass of electrical impulses is forwarded to the cerebral cortex via the optic nerve and a complex nerve network.

The cerebral cortex is equipped with a visual processing center which integrates data from both eyes and inverts the upside down image. That provides us with our three-dimensional right-side-up picture. Exactly how the brain interprets those electrical impulses and turns them into a picture is still a mystery.

Eye Components and Functions

Just how complicated is the eye? Each human eye contains over 137 million essential working parts. Can you imagine a machine that complex? Let's take a look at some of these components and their functions.

The outside layer is called the sclerotic layer. It's white, semi-rigid, and gives the eyeball its basic shape and provides a measure of protection as well.

The middle layer is called the choroid layer. It's a dark pigment containing numerous blood vessels. Its job is to prevent light from reflecting within the eye.

The inner layer is called the retina. It contains 130 million rods which see in black and shades of gray, and 7 million cones which provide sharp, clear color vision. Each cone is sensitive to only color: red, green, or blue light. Rods and cones are actually photoreceptor cells connected to sensory neurons. The retina changes light into electrical nerve impulses.

Conjunctiva - A mucous membrane which lines the inner surface of the eyelid and the exposed surface of the eye and lubricates both.

Cornea - A uniformly thick, transparent nearly circular disc covering the lens. It serves as a window letting light into the eye, and it also protects the lens.

Aqueous humor - A clear, lymph-like fluid between the cornea and lens.

Iris- The color-pigmented membrane separating the cornea from the lens. It adjusts the size of the pupil regulating the amount of light admitted to the eye.

Pupil - The black circular hole through which light enters the eye.

Ciliary muscles - Controls the shape of the iris which in turn adjusts the size of the pupil.

Lens - A transparent part of the eye that focuses light to form an image of the retina.

Vitreous humor - The transparent substance which fills the eye.

Eye muscles - Six muscles attached to the eye which provide movement.

Tear ducts and glands - A system for lubricating and protecting the eye.

The eye also has a few accessories:

Eyelashes and eyebrows - Both assist in keeping out debris. Each serves as a defense mechanism for the eye.

That is a remarkable number of parts working together for a common purpose. Don't forget that each of these items must be coded into the DNA at its appropriate location to integrate and coordinate with all the other eye features. It has all the appearances of design. It's difficult to see how it could be anything else. The same thought occurred to Charles Darwin. The eye "with all of its inimitable contrivances" gave him second thoughts about his natural selection theory.

Television Analogy

Have you ever looked inside of a television set? Inside you find a number of panels with numerous miniature parts seemingly all mixed together in a hodge-podge collection. But that is not really the case. Those panels are circuit boards. And on those circuit boards are carefully positioned transistors, capacitors, resistors, conductors, transformers, and other electronic parts all creating an image on the picture tube.

Each tiny part is exactly the correct type, size, and strength needed for that particular spot on the circuit board. If anything is out of line, chances are you will not get a picture. Just as in the eye, all parts are essential.

We know that television didn't just happen. It took some intelligent people a good number of years to figure out the technology and put it into place. The eye is considerably more complicated than any TV. It has far more parts to harmonize than even the most expensive television set. All indications are that the human eye was put together by Someone whose intelligence and technology are vastly superior to our own. In Origin of the Species, Charles Darwin seems to agree.

Evolutionists' Explanation for Vision

How do evolutionists account for eyesight? They believe that the eye began as a light-sensitive spot on a cell. Step-by-step, random mutation after mutation, light-sensitive cells folded inward to form a retina. Somehow mutations made the skin on the surface transparent, part of which turned into a lens focusing light on the newly formed retina.

Again, random mistake after mistake after mistake added parts to the eye which in time became the fully functional, complex, detailed organ we have today. Evolutionists arrange a series of compound eyes from different creatures which they claim show the evolutionary steps leading up to the human eye.

What's wrong with the evolutionist's story? Quite a bit. The speculation about a gradual mutation-led construction of the eye is just that - speculation. There are no partially formed eyes in the fossil record. Different types of eyes? Yes,. But they are all complete, fully functional systems with every component in place and accounted for.

Furthermore, the eye by itself does not give us vision. The optic nerve, the thalamus, and a series of nerves linking the eye to the brain are all required. And there's more. The brain has a primary visual cortex and a visual association cortex set up to decode and interpret the incoming information.

See how complex it is? The eye, the optic nerve, the thalamus, the nerve network, and the brain's visual processing centers all had to be in place and fully operational before sight was possible.

How do evolutionists account for these extra components in our visual system? They don't. They ignore them. Evolutionists can only say, "Mistake after mistake in the DNA must have produced these essential ingredients." Incremental evolutionary steps is not a reasonable explanation for sight. Furthermore, observation and dissection of plants and animals have not revealed any developing incomplete organ of any type presently in nature. And the fossil record has yet to show any developing, incomplete organ of any type in the past.

Color Vision

Color vision, says biologist Michael Pitman in his book Adam and Evolution, presents yet another problem for the evolutionists. Most creatures don't have it. Only several bony fishes, reptiles, birds, bees plus other assorted insects, and primates see in color. Yes, that does leave out other mammals such as cats, dogs, horses, and bulls, all of which see in black, white, and shades of gray.

That's just an interesting quirk of nature unless, of course, you are a protozoa-to-man evolutionist. Then you have a problem. You find yourself defending the following proposition: Fish evolved retinal cones allowing color vision.
Evolving into amphibians, color vision was somehow lost, only to resurface (maybe we should call it re-evolve) in certain birds and related reptiles. But when it came to mammals color vision was lost again. However, color vision did another about-face and reemerged in primates. How's that for a twisted story?

Two Eyes Standard

If you were to line up every amphibian, reptile, bird, and mammal, and look each one squarely in the face, what would you see? About the same as you see when you look at your own reflection in the mirror. You find a balanced symmetrical face: two ears - one on each side, two eyes overlooking a single nose in the center with a mouth directly below. Species after species fit that general description including the vast majority of fish too.

But why two eyes? Evolutionists have an answer: "Three dimensional vision was essential for our ancestors swinging through the trees." Using our imagination, we can see luckless one-eyed primates banging into trees due to their lack of depth perception.

With their extinction only the two-eyed types were left to carry on. Even if we accept natural selection's bias against one-eyed tree swingers, that still does not explain all of those other two-eyed amphibians, reptiles, birds, mammals, and fish who never had to contend with tree swinging.

For all practical purposes, one eye should suffice. Think of all it takes to make one eye work. Well over a hundred million individual parts must work in unison - with each other and with a nerve network and a specialized optic nerve section of the brain. When the whole system is in gear and producing - you have vision.

It's next to impossible to see how evolution's haphazard errors could ever accidentally conjure up one eye. Even so, that's far more feasible than two eyes emerging from such a questionable source. One-eyed creatures, however, are nowhere to be found - in or out of the fossil record.

Of course two eyes are better than one. They cover a wider territory, and you have a built-in spare should one go bad. Depth perception does assist predators in pinpointing their prey, and it helps the prey to avoid the predators. But if we start considering evolutionary advantages, why not three eyes instead of two? Wouldn't that be even better? Sure, why not four or five eyes while we are at it?

And how many times has a predator slipped up on the back of as unsuspecting prey? If the prey had an eye or two in the back of its head, wouldn't it be a leg up in the evolutionary sweepstakes?

Yet no amphibian, reptile, bird or mammal has opted for either the evolutionary shortcut of a single eye or the evolutionary advantage of more than two eyes.

If the only thing at work here is random, haphazard, off-the-wall mutations, those persistent two-eyed creatures extending back millions of years make no sense at all. On the other hand, if those amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals were designed, there is a logical explanation for the consistent pattern. The designer liked the two ears, two eyes, single nose and mouth look. And that's the way he made them.

Ear Components and Functions

Turning our attention to the ear, we find a repeat of the eye story. The characters are different, but the theme is the same. The outer ear, ear canal, eardrum, eustachian tube, hammer, anvil, stirrup, cochlea, cochlear nerve, and the auditory center of the temporal lobe - all work in harmony for a common purpose. Actually, ears serve two purposes: hearing and balance.

Here is how the ear works: The outer ear collects sound and funnels it into a one-inch irregularly shaped ear canal. The canal acts as a filter. Numerous hairs plus four thousand wax-producing glands keep out foreign particles and provides a constant moist temperature for the delicate middle and inner ear.

The eardrum is located at the end of the ear canal. Sound vibrations are passed from the eardrum to a trio of linked bones in the middle ear. They are named for their shapes: the hammer, anvil, and stirrup. These three tiny bones amplify the sound into the inner ear. Air pressure is equalized on either side of the eardrum by a vent leading from the middle ear to the throat. It's called the eustachian tube.

In the inner ear, we find what appears to be a small snail shell. This little device is the cochlea. The cochlea is only about the size of a hazelnut, but it has a big job. It is usually compared to one of two things. Some say it is similar to a telephone system with enough circuits to service a good-sized city.

Others liken the cochlea to a piano keyboard with twenty thousand or so different keys. Either way, you get the idea; it is a very small but extraordinarily complex structure.

Incoming sound frequencies which have been amplified by the hammer-anvil-stirrup combination, vibrate hair-like sensory cells in the cochlea. The cochlea's job is to translate sound waves into nerve impulses. Varying sound frequencies strike different sections of the sensory cells in numerous combinations. Nerve impulses travel from the cochlea on to the auditory nerve and on into the brain. And that is what we hear.

Once again we see an organ which has all the appearances of design. It takes a great leap of faith to claim it is an accumulation of DNA errors. There is no evidence for such a claim nor facts to support it. The only reasonable conclusion is that Someone with a good solid knowledge of physics, biology, and micro-technology designed and made this complex, intricate, and delicate organ.

Analogies and Conclusion

Have you ever seen a cornfield? A cornfield is nothing but acre after acre of cornstalks all about the same height, all in neat rows with little on no grass between. After seeing a cornfield, it would never occur to you that the whole thing could be an accident. Nature just doesn't do that sort of thing. Someone cleared the ground and planted the seeds.

Let's try another example. On either side of the road you notice a row of evenly spaced dogwood trees. And each tree is circled by a single row of flowers. No one needs to tell you that somebody purposely planted those trees and flowers.

We know that Mount Rushmore bears the likenesses of four U.S. presidents. If your geography teacher were to tell you that those heads of Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, and Roosevelt were accidentally formed by natural erosion, would you believe it? If your English teacher were to tell you the first unabridged English dictionary resulted from an accidental explosion in a print shop, would you laugh?

Nature is not neat. It's not symmetrical; nor is it artistic or creative. No, it is just the opposite -- disorganized, erratic, and chaotic. You and I know if nature is left to its own devices, it will grow an irregular assortment of weeds, but not a neat row of crops. It will grow an odd collection of various trees scattered hither, thither, and yon, but not evenly spaced dogwoods with a single row of flowers circling each.

Erosion will create ugly gashes in hillsides, but it won't carve statues of presidents out of rock. An explosion can blow a print shop to smithereens, but it is not going to create a dictionary. Nature doesn't build things up; it doesn't create patterns; and it doesn't produce complex designs.

Nature did not create the bombardier's chemical defense system, nor the millipede's hydrogen cyanide system, nor the human eye or ear. Nor did nature create the extraordinary computer called the brain, whose operation is still beyond our full understanding. The only logical explanation is that each was designed. And where we find such clear evidence of design, it's reasonable to assume a Designer.

Speaking in vague generalities, evolution often seems plausible. But getting down to the nitty-gritty of specific organs such as eyes and ears, we find evolution an inadequate and impractical answer.