#36 The Zoo

When was the last time that you went to the Zoo? 

I don’t know about you, but I have always been fascinated at the zoo. The educational opportunities are endless and the exhibits are from all over the world, not just our country. It was always really special to go as a kid myself and then later to take my own kids when they were young. Now I’m looking forward to taking my grandchildren when they come along.

What kinds of animals do they put in a Zoo? Do you see dogs and cats, squirrels, robins and starlings, cows or horses there? No. They will always try to put animals there that you will never see in your neighborhood. They go for animals that are somehow amazing, especially for kids.

The largest Zoos in the world are Toronto Zoo and the Omaha Zoo, both with over 17,000 species of animals. Think about that. How long would it take you to study each unique one? Each has a totally different set of DNA and different physical characteristics, lifestyle, digestive system, reproductive systems, locomotion, on and on.

How many animals are there that you have never seen? How about fish or birds? Then there are plants and insects. I saw recently that there are 383 different species of hummingbirds alone.

Nobody knows how many species there are in the world. I searched around for estimates of how many species there are of all the kinds of living beings. Here is a link to a New York Times article that reports on an estimate of  8.7 million species.[1] But there are estimates as high as 100 million. Researchers are reporting over 15,000 new species discovered EVERY YEAR. Scientists have named and categorized ONLY 1.3 million so far.

If a zoo has 17,000 species, it only has 1.3% of the already named species, which is a small fraction of the estimated total number of species.

http://animals.about.com/od/zoologybasics/a/howmanyspecies.htm

There are 43,271 cataloged species of fungi of an estimated 660,000 to 5.1 million. There are approximately 6,500 species of millipedes. Mollusks, slugs, and snails make up an estimated 100,000 species. Starfish, sea urchins, and their relatives make up 6,500 species.

There are an estimated 5,000 species of mammals, 9,000 to 10,000 species of birds, 23,500 species of fish, 1 million to 30 million species of insects, 298,000 species of plants. The most amazing fact of all is that scientists really have no idea of how many species are yet to be discovered and estimates vary all over the place.

“We’ve only touched the surface of understanding animal life,” said entomologist Brian Fisher of the California Academy of Sciences. “We’ve discovered just 10 percent of all living things on this planet.” [2]

I personally guess he might be overestimating what we know.

I’ve collected a bunch of pictures below from websites of various zoos that show some strange and unusual creatures in their zoos. Look at these pictures and imagine that there are literally millions of other beings for each one of them. This is an extremely small sampling of amazing creatures.

If you want to be even more amazed, just go to Google Images and do a search for moths, butterflies, birds, snakes, dogs, cats, fish, or whatever else you can possibly think of. Then look over those images for a while. 

Evolutionists say they believe that every single one of these species exists totally and absolutely by accident, without any intelligence behind it. It was all godless mutations and survival of the fittest. They want me to believe that every color, shape, and ability came into existence because it was the result of millions of mutations and then natural selection choosing the character trait because it was the most "beneficial" for survival. To me that is so implausible as to be incomprehensible. I am flabbergasted that anyone could believe it.

I hope that they will go spend some time at the Zoo. In fact, let’s all go there.

There has to be God.
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[1] How Many Species? A Study Says 8.7 Million, but It’s Tricky. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/30/science/30species.html

[2] http://www.livescience.com/4593-greatest-mysteries-species-exist-earth.html

http://www.sfzoo.org/leafinsects

http://animal.discovery.com/tv-shows/other/videos/fooled-by-nature-star-nosed-mole.htm

http://www.torontozoo.com/ExploreTheZoo/AnimalDetails.asp?pg=640

http://www.philadelphiazoo.org/Animals/Birds/Other-Birds/Black-Capped-Lorikeet.aspx

http://www.sfzoo.org/pinktoetarantula

http://www.bronxzoo.com/animals-and-exhibits/animals/mammals/sifaka.aspx

http://www.sfzoo.org/aniseswallowtailcaterpillars

http://www.torontozoo.com/ExploreTheZoo/AnimalDetails.asp?pg=600
Grey-necked crowned crane

http://www.torontozoo.com/ExploreTheZoo/AnimalDetails.asp?pg=507  
MacLeay’s spectres

http://www.montereybayaquarium.org/animals/AnimalDetails.aspx?enc=n3f4wmcSJaMOCtHyd6DEPA==

http://www.torontozoo.com/ExploreTheZoo/AnimalDetails.asp?pg=473
Poison Dart Frog

http://www.torontozoo.com/ExploreTheZoo/AnimalDetails.asp?pg=813  
Longnose butterflyfish

http://www.omahazoo.com/exhibits/aquarium/
Bowmouth Guitarfish

http://www.amusingplanet.com/2012/12/meet-most-gorgeous-peacock-spider.html

#35 Natural Selection

The concept of “Natural Selection”, sometimes used synonymous with “Survival of the Fittest”, is often touted as the magic process that when added to mutation will result in advancing steps of higher and higher species and the success of evolution.[1] But I encourage you to read up on what Natural Selection is all about and see that it will NOT lead to evolution. Check out the examples that are given, and see for yourself what a fanciful argument this is for evolution of molecules to man. Actually you can't even start with molecules because Natural Selection ONLY works on a species once it can reproduce.

What they actually mean by "natural selection" is what we believers in God totally accept and we call it adaption to the environment. It’s a wonderful God-given quality in Nature that creatures have that allows them to better survive. But it is never a process that will give you a new species.

"Natural Selection" is also sometimes referred to as “Survival of the Fittest”. However, as a term used by scientists and evolutionists, it does not refer to what we normally think of as being “fit”, which means the healthiest, strongest, smartest, or fastest. For them it actually means the ones who were reproductively fittest and left the most descendants  To rephrase the term, we could say “Survival of the ones that survived”. Pretty unscientific huh?[2] Some of them even understand the problem with their logic, namely saying the same thing twice and calling it a proof. That’s tautology and not proof of anything. But then they go right on with the same type of assumptions anyway.

Most of us understand the concept of dog breeding or horse breeding where we selectively try to bring out certain characteristics like speed or size or something. It’s mating together certain males with certain females. This is all that Natural Selection claims it is doing EXCEPT it happens “out in the wild” without any interference from humans. Now who do you think can do a better job of purposeful breeding and selection, “the wilds of nature” or a human in a controlled environment of matching certain males and females? Need I remind you that humans have never been able to breed a new species with all their efforts (very intelligent, not mindless) over decades of trying.

Let’s walk through a simplified example and see if this process makes any sense as a mechanism for evolving any new species. Let’s assume there is a wild dog population where the dogs have genes for producing long-haired or short-haired descendants.  Assume also that one gene pair controls the length of hair. If a given dog has both types of genes (LH and SH for long hair and short hair), then it will have medium length hair.

What happens next, the environment changes and gets much colder over time. What supposedly happens? By Natural Selection the short haired dogs will die out faster, leaving more and more long haired dogs to reproduce. But looking at the genes, this process is not evolving toward a new or higher species. Actually the dog population is losing genetic diversity and DNA information, not gaining it.

So Natural Selection is not a process that will get you a new species at all because the species is LOSING genetic information. It's going backwards from the way evolution is supposed to go.

This is when evolutionist believers will fall back on mutation as the place where the new genetic information comes from. After there is mutation, then Natural Selection can work its magic. But we already saw in an earlier blog that mutation does not work. (See my blog on Mutation. [3])

So evolutionist believers count on two processes that demonstrably don’t work at all for producing evolution separately, but when combined somehow magically work. In mathematics, when two processes are combined, you multiply the odds of success of one process times the odds of success of the other. The odds will be even less likely when the two processes are combined. I remind you that 40 years of intentional and intelligent efforts to develop mutated fruit flies has never gotten anything but fruit flies. None of them that survived was better off (i.e. more “fit”) than the fruit flies they started with. Not even any improvements could be mutated into the fruit flies. But evolutionist believers will still insist that millions of extremely complicated species all happened accidentally. They don’t just believe in one very improbable accident, they believe in billions upon billions of progressive accidents one after another building up higher and higher levels of species. There are millions upon millions of species on earth (plants, animals, fish, insects, etc.), each functioning very successfully but with hundreds of very distinguishable characteristics.

Another problem at issue for Natural Selection producing evolution is “How do you get the starting point?” Natural Selection only works when there is already a living organism that can reproduce. Natural Selection cannot explain the first organism. Scientists now know that the simplest of all species capable of reproduction has at least 250,000 ordered genes. What explains ordered genes on that magnitude from an accidental process.

We creationists do believe in Natural Selection as it is OBSERVED in nature. God designed it and it testifies to God’s design skills. The truth about the process of Natural Selection is that it is a conservation mechanism that helps prevent species from going extinct by keeping harmful mutations from proliferating in a population. But as a proof for godless evolution, it fails miserably.

I invite you to Google “examples of Natural Selection”. All you get are examples of adaptations that creatures have made within a species, never one species evolving into another species. Molecules to man is an extraordinarily long path for evolution to try to walk.

The website for Discover.com has pages on the “10 Examples of Natural Selection” [4]. They offer different examples of peppered moths, colored snakes, chemical resistant insects, Galapagos Island finch’s beaks, male peacock tail feathers, a certain ability of warrior ants, deer mice changing color, etc., and even humans getting sickle cell anemia. All they talk about is changes WITHIN a species and still they name it evolution. Excuse me, that is NOT the definition of evolving. Just by waving the magic words, they claim this is the scientific proof that dirt became dinosaurs. Sorry, I can’t believe that, too preposterous.

I must conclude the evolutionists are not really looking at the evidence impartially, they have already decided the conclusion and are grabbing at straws to justify it. That’s very poor science.

Eventually, the honest scientists will conclude along with the rest of us that there must be God.

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[1] "The essence of Darwinism lies in a single phrase: Natural selection is the creative force of evolutionary change. No one denies that selection will play a negative role in eliminating the unfit. Darwinian theories require that it create the fit as well." - Stephen J. Gould, famous evolutionist, “The Return of Hopeful Monsters”, Natural History, vol 86, June/July 1977, p 28

[2] "What is most unsettling is that some evolutionary biologists have no qualms about proposing tautologies as explanations. One would immediately reject any lexicographer who tried to define a word by the same word, or a thinker who merely restated his proposition, or any other instance of gross redundancy; yet no one seems scandalized that men of science should be satisfied with a major principle which is no more than a tautology." - Gregory Alan Pesely, "The Epistemological Status of Natural Selection", Laval Theologique et Philosophique, vol 38, Feb 1982, p 74.

[3]  #27 The Truth About Mutation
  http://101proofsforgod.blogspot.com/2013/02/27-truth-about-mutation.html

[4] http://dsc.discovery.com/tv-shows/curiosity/topics/10-examples-natural-selection.htm