CRT-OV-88

YAPOK is another name for the Water Opossum, a marsupial
mammal which lives in Central and South America. They are
the only living aquatic marsupials, and spend much of their lives
swimming in rivers, feeding on crayfish, shrimps and other water
creatures. Yapoks have a number of special design features to suit
their aquatic lifestyle. They have water-proof fur and webbed
hindfeet to aid swimming.
Yapoks build a nest on land, where they
give birth to up to five young, which are
very tiny, being born just 12-14 days after
mating. Like all marsupials, Yapoks have a
pouch, and as soon as they are born their
tiny offspring make their way to it, where
South
America
Green areas show the
Yapok’s main habitats
they find her nipples and feed on milk.
Unlike land-dwelling opossums and almost
all other marsupials, the Yapok has a backward-facing
pouch. There is also another
unique feature: a ring of special muscles on
the female’s pouch provides a water-tight
seal. Together with the backward-facing
WHY NOT A COMMON DESIGN?
According to evolutionists, the fact that all insects
have the same basic body plan means they must
have all evolved from a common ancestor. However,
in the absence of fossil evidence for this, a
common body plan could just as easily mean a
common design.
Manufacturers of motor cars follow a basic
design. For example, most cars have four wheels,
brakes, headlights and a steering wheel. No-one
would suggest that this means that all cars came
from the same factory. The common design just turns out to be
the most economical and efficient, so why start from scratch?
In the same way, a wise Creator wouldn’t use a different body
plan for the many different kinds of insects when one basic plan
works so well. Human engineers have designed robotic insects.
Although inferior to real insects, they involved much intelligent
Alberto D'Ottavi: CC by 2 licence
A robotic insect
thought and planning. The whole natural world, including insects,
shows similar evidence of intelligent design.
We believe the Designer is the God of the Bible, who revealed Himself uniquely in Jesus
Christ. “Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been
made. In him was life.” (The Bible, John 1: 3-4). Jesus is not only the source of all physical
life, but also of spiritual life. We have all sinned against God in various ways, which leads
to spiritual deadness. But through the death and resurrection of Jesus we can know our
Creator, discover life’s real purpose and receive eternal life. Jesus said, “Truly I tell you,
whoever hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life and will not be
judged but has crossed over from death to life.” (The Bible, John 5: 24).
The Yapok or Water Opossum
design, this means that it doesn’t fill with water and
drown her babies while she is swimming underwater!
They remain quite safe in that watertight pocket
with a supply of air. At the age of around 5 weeks
they become too large to fit in the pouch, but are still
looked after by their mother for a while, and sometimes
ride on her back.
We know that natural selection enables creatures
to adapt and change within limits. However,
it’s hard to believe that natural selection could
cause the Yapok’s pouch to gradually change its
orientation and at the same time develop the
special muscles to make a water-tight seal. How
could there be a transitional stage? And how
would the young survive before everything was
complete? The evidence suggests that the
Yapok had this special design from the start.
TEACHER: John, why are
you doing your math
multiplication on the floor?
JOHN: You told me to do it
without using tables!
How would you describe a
car crash involving a
dinosaur?
A Tyrannasaurus wreck!
Original View is published three times
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HOLY BIBLE NEW INTERNATION-
AL VERSION © 1973, 1978, 1984 by
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by permission of Hodder &
Stoughton. All rights reserved.
Illustrations in this issue from
Clipart.com and Wikipedia.com
© 2019. Printed by CPO Worthing
By Christian Fischer: Wikipedia
The
ORIGINAL
VIEW No. 88
The Abominable (Butterfly) Mystery
Insect Flight Puzzle
The Miracle of Metamorphosis
Bible-believing Scientist with 9 degrees!
Did Social Insects Evolve?
Well Designed: The Yapok
Why we need Insects
Why not a Common Design?
Insects make up about 85% of all known species. There are believed to
be around 200 million insects for every person on earth! Did they
evolve? The evidence says “No!”
A living silverfish
1. Sciencedaily.com January 23rd 1918.
2. Livescience.com. 6th November 2014
of
The oldest confirmed insect fossil is that of a wingless, silverfish-like creature, claimed
to be “385 million years old.” Then, according to the evolutionists’ dating system, there
is a gap of “60 million years” before the fossils of other insects appear. Sandra Schachat
of Stanford Earth, told Science Daily: “There’s been quite a bit of mystery around how
insects first arose, because for many millions of years you had nothing, and then just all
of a sudden an explosion of insects.” 1
According to entomologist (insect expert) Professor Karl Kjer: "If
you had a time machine and you went back to the Jurassic, we
entomologists would recognize all of the insects and we could
[classify] them into their proper order. Many of them would look
very similar to what we see today.” 2 There were modern-type
insects such as grasshoppers, crickets, butterflies and dragonfiles
living alongside the dinosaurs. The only change is that
modern insects are much smaller than those in the fossil record.
INSECTS
HOW INSECTS SEE
Why is it so hard to swat
a fly? It’s because flies,
like most insects have
compound eyes (left)
with thousands of lenses
which enable them to
see all around them. Did
compound eyes evolve from something simpler?
The evidence suggests the answer is “No.”
Fossils of a strange
creature called Anomalocaris
(right), dated
at about ‘515 million
years old’, revealed it
had compound eyes
Thomas Shahan: Wikipedia
on stalks. Each eye
had around 16,000
facets (flies have
Reconstruction by
Nobu Tamura: Wikipedia
around 3,000). Evolutionists are perplexed, and
say this shows that compound eyes must have
evolved very rapidly. We suggest this shows that
eyes didn’t evolve at all.

By Dr Alexander Mayer: Wikipedia
Wikipedia photo by Falconaumanni
1. Accessed 09/01/2019
2. C F Alexander 1818-85
pexels.com
A moth pollinating a Zinnia, using its
specially designed proboscis
reveal: “The particular type of fossils found mean we have to rethink Lepidoptera [butterfly
and moth] evolution. They imply that the long tube butterflies and moths use to suck nectar
from flowers actually developed before flowering plants did, so it must have originally evolved
for a different purpose.” (15th January 2018)
Charles Darwin called the evolution of flowering plants "an abominable mystery." The new
mystery is why would those insects have the special mouth parts millions of years before there
were any flowers? We suggest the evolutionists’ dating system is totally inaccurate and a more
convincing explanation is that both the insects and the flowers were designed in the beginning
to compliment one another. There is certainly no fossil evidence that these insects evolved
from earlier, less specialisedancestors.
Close-up of a dragonfly’s wing
By Kara Stenberg: Flickr.
Creative Commons Licence
DISCLAIMER: Although we quote the dates evolutionists have assigned
to fossils, we do not accept them. For an article about this, go
to: creation.com/flaws-in-dating-the-earth-as-ancient
Wikipedia photo by Totodu74
of METAMORPHOSIS
The life cycle of a Monarch Butterfly:
egg to caterpillar, to chrysalis, to adult
The abominable (butterfly) mystery
Some butterflies and moths pollinate flowers, and have special mouthparts, called
proboscii — hollow tongues designed to suck nectar from flowers. Until recently
evolutionists had a neat theory about the origin of these pollinating insects: they
“co-evolved” along with the flowers themselves. This theory has been blown apart
by the discovery of fossil remains of butterflies and moths in “200 million year old”
strata in northern Germany. They are said to be “70 million
years older” than the oldest known fossils of flowering
plants, yet these fossils point to them already having those
special mouth parts. This presents evolutionists with a
puzzle, as these words from online science journal Phys.org
Fossils of Montsechia, the
oldest flowering plant, said
to be “130 million years old”.
The
The Wikipedia entry on the Origin of Insects states, “The In the 1830s a German naturalist
named Renous was arrested
first insects were land bound, but about 400 million years
ago in the Devonian period one lineage of insects evolved in Chile, accused of heresy for
flight, the first animals to do so.” 1 . Although it is claimed claiming he could turn caterpillars
into butterflies! Of course,
that insects “evolved flight” the first flying insects to appear
in the fossil record had fully-fledged wings, including giant caterpillars really do turn into
dragonflies with wingspans of up to 75cm (30 ins.)
butterflies after passing through
According to evolutionists, the chrysalis stage. After hatching
from the egg, caterpillars
after the first appearance of
insects there is a gap of feed greedily for a while, before
around “60 million years” spinning a cocoon around them-
with no insect fossils of any
kind. Then a huge range of
insects, including many kinds
of flying insects, appears suddenly
in the rock record with
A fossil dragonfly
no ancestors. It is within that
gap that wings are said to have evolved! So the evidence
suggests that flying insects didn’t evolve from anything.
Like non-flying insects, flying insects have six legs, so what
could their wings have evolved from? They also needed
special muscles for moving and folding their wings. The
wings of insects are very delicate and often beautiful, and it
seems impossible to believe
they evolved by chance. Creation
makes more sense.
Maybe the 19th century
hymn writer was right after
all: “He made their glowing
colours. He made their tiny
wings.” 2
selves and becoming a chrysalis. The caterpillar’s body then
dissolves into a kind of mushy “soup” with no trace of the original
body parts. After a while, the chrysalis spilts open and a beautiful
butterfly emerges!
The life cycle of dragonflies involves only three
stages, but is still amazing. When dragonflies lay
eggs, they hatch into nymphs (left), which spend
several years in rivers and streams. They are
ferocious predators, feeding on water creatures.
They moult (change their skin) several times before
they eventually climb up a stem, their skin
splits, and a beautiful dragonfly emerges, spreads
its wings and flies away!
How did these processes originate? In
each case the adult bears no resemblance
to the juvenile stage. All the instructions for
these changes must be coded in the DNA
of the insects which laid the eggs. Can
evolution explain it? Apparently not. “The
evolution of insect metamorphosis remains
a genuine biological mystery even
today.” 1 No credible theory to explain a
step-by-step origin of metamorphosis has
been proposed.
1. Scientific American, 10th August 2010
See: Inexplicable insect metamorphosis” at https://tinyurl.com/ya8eoylj
A dragonfly emerging
from its old skin
before taking flight.
By Laurie Williams: Publicdomainpictures.net
By Clinton & Charles Robertson: Wikipedia
Dr Gerald Bergman – nine academic degrees
Dr Gerald (’Jerry’) Bergman (right), instructor of science at Northwest State College,
Archbold, Ohio, has nine earned academic degrees. He started in 1985 as a graduate
student in biochemistry at Medical College of Ohio, and also taught biology, chemistry and
physics, He has over 700 publications in scientific and popular journals, and has been a
consultant for more than 20 science textbooks. His work has been translated into 12
languages and he has spoken widely in the United States, Canada and Europe.
Following a 35-year study, Dr Bergman, a committed Christian, rejected evolution, which he now labels “the
greatest deception in history”, and came to believe that special creation fits the evidence much better. His
anti-evolution views led to much opposition from the evolutionary establishment, and he was forced to relinquish
his post as assistant professor at Bowling Green State University. Since then he has been heavily involved in the
modern creation movement.
Dr Bergman is very critical of the evolutionists’ claim that all life evolved from some hypothetical first cell. He
writes: “A cell can come only from a functioning cell and cannot be built up piecemeal, because all the major
organelles [subunits] must have been created and assembled instantaneously for the cell to exist.” In his view,
“One of the most compelling evidences in support of the instantaneous creation worldview is the daily observation
that information does not come about by chance and, if left to itself, disorder usually soon results. Archaeologists
are normally easily able to discern if an object found in their field research digs was produced by
humans or by natural events such as wind or rain.” He concludes: “Since the law of biogenesis states
that life proceeds only from preexisting life, various forms of preexisting life must have been parents
of all living organisms. And since life cannot create itself, the source of life must be God: “O Lord …
.For with you is the fountain of life” (Ps. 36:69)” 1
Dr Bergman is very critical of the harmful impact of evolutionary philosophy, especially in giving rise
to such ideologies as Hitler’s nazism. His recent book The Dark Side of Charles Darwin reveals some
disturbing facts about Darwin and his motives
1. Quotes from In Six Days: Why Fifty Ph.D. scientists choose to believe in Creation, Master Books, 2001.
Above: bee on
flower, dung
beetle, ladybird.
WHY WE NEED INSECTS
Insects may sometimes annoy
us, especially when they buzz
around our head. However, the
fact is that we couldn’t exist
without them. They are a vital
part of the “web of life”, and
perform numerous important
tasks. These include the pollination
of plants, without which
many plants and trees would
never bear fruit, and we would
starve! Insects also perform a
valuable “clean-up service”,
eating rubbish and decaying
animal and vegetable matter.
Dung beetles feed on animal
droppings!
Some insects are useful as
pest controllers. For example, ladybirds and hoverflies
eat aphids which attack and harm many
plants. Organic farmers and gardeners buy natural
predators instead of using chemicals.
It surely takes a lot of faith to believe that all of this
is the result of millions of years of random, chance
processes. It looks very much as though the natural
world was designed for a purpose.
Photo: www.ant.org
This ant, trapped in Baltic
amber, and claimed to be
‘46 million years old’, is
clearly a worker ant.
ants which are removed from the
colony and forced to live alone, soon
die. So they are clearly designed to
live as part of a community, and
can’t function alone.
Bees, wasps, ants and termites
work together to construct their complex
nests, and appear to be preprogrammed
to do this. The huge
mud nest on the right, photographed
in Australia, was made by tiny termites.
The ability to do this must be
coded in their DNA, and could not
have arisen by random chance.
There are a number of insects,
known as social insects, which live
in societies. How this communal living
originated has been a puzzle for
evolutionists ever since Darwin’s
time. These insects are totally dependant
on one another and can
only function as a unit. The fossil
record suggests that ants have
aways lived in communities.
Scientists have discovered that
By Ray Norris: Wikipedia