#69 The Archerfish

All over the world there are hundreds and thousands of animals, fish, insects, and plants that refute the Theory of Evolution. I’ve already shown that neither mutations nor natural selection is a process that can lead to new species (Proofs #27 and #35). But let’s spend a few minutes talking about a certain fish called the Archerfish that lives in Asia. After I describe its astounding abilities, involving the solutions to complex problems of physics, you’ll be convinced there was an intelligence behind its design and existence. It didn’t come about by accident.

The Archerfish has the amazing ability to shoot a jet of water out of its mouth and knock bugs and lizards off of low hanging branches so it can eat them.

Recent research was completed and published which reveals that its abilities are way more remarkable than they seem at first, although they are very impressive indeed at the beginning.[1], [2]

As I describe what the Archerfish is able to do, please try to imagine what Darwin would say is the process for the development of this species. Remember Darwinian progress is slow and gradual, taking place over many generations.

Researchers measured the distance the Archerfish could shoot its stream of water and it is a maximum of 6 feet 6 inches. Note that the average Archerfish is only about 6 inches long. They have a unique shape to their mouth and tongue and their gills squeeze the water out at high speed. How far can a human spit do you think? How accurate is the human? And remember that the Archerfish is shooting up.

Here is a link to a slow motion video (21 sec.) of an Archerfish in action. There are links to more videos in the footnotes below.[3]

The unique tongue and mouth shape allow the Archerfish to channel the water and control the stream driven by powerful gills. Since no other fish has anything like this ability, there is no clue about another species it could have come from. There are no fossils either to indicate a slow and gradual development. One quarter or one half of this ability is obviously useless. Natural Selection if it were true would not select for any of the intermediate steps.

Even more amazing is that researchers have discovered that the Archerfish can make adjustments according to the target it is shooting at. For example it can judge the distance to the prey and shoot closer or farther bursts of water. Due to the shape of its mouth, the water in the stream tends to gather at the tip of the stream into a glob so there is a greater mass to knock the bug off the branch. The Archerfish seems to be able to adjust the amount of water depending on the size of the bug.

Obviously some bugs are farther away, so the Archerfish has to be able to adjust the distance it shoots. But this presents a very complicated problem of physics. As the water travels through the air, gravity pulls down on it causing it to curve downward. The Archerfish has to be able to aim in a way that gravity is taken into account and perfectly adjust the angle and force to shoot the water over the distance required.

Here’s another problem the Archerfish overcomes. If you have a fishtank, you know that looking from air through the water surface causes “refraction” of the light, making the contents of the fishtank displaced from where it appears.[4] This also occurs looking out of the water. Somehow the Archerfish can account for the refracting property of the surface of the water and still aim accurately enough to hit its target on the tree branch.

How could the brain of the Archerfish ever evolve slowly over many generations to be able to do this without the whole species going extinct from lack of food? Just think of the odds of one single Archerfish mutating and acquiring this ability. That’s astronomical odds already. Then somehow that Archerfish has to mate and produce descendants that can do the same thing. This ability has to work correctly or it is useless. It cannot develop in slow stages over many generations.

The Archerfish somehow uses its tongue and a channel in the roof of its mouth to make a nozzle that gets the stream of water to gather together at the tip of the stream, making a bigger glob to attack the prey. Researchers calculated that the force of the water is about ten times the bug’s ability to hold on to the branch. The Archerfish is able to adjust the size of the glob to the size of the target.

“Furthermore, the time needed until water assembles at the jet tip is not fixed. Rather, it is adjusted so that maximum focusing occurs just before impact. Surprisingly, the fish achieve this by modulating the dynamics of changes in the cross-section of their mouth opening, a mechanism that seems to not have been applied yet in human-built nozzles." [5]

You are an intelligent being. Just imagine what effort and practice it would take you to learn how to spit like this. Could you get good at it? Now can you imagine a fish brain learning to do it all by accident. I can’t.

There must be God.

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[1] Sumit Passary, No crosshair, no laser but archerfish always hits bull's eye. Guess why?,

http://www.techtimes.com/articles/15027/20140906/no-crosshair-no-laser-but-archerfish-always-hits-the-bulls-eye-heres-how.htm

[2] Peggy Gerullis and Stefan Schuster, Archerfish Actively Control the Hydrodynamics of Their Jets, http://www.cell.com/current-biology/abstract/S0960-9822(14)00922-1

[3] Archer Fish Water Pistol - Weird Nature - BBC, (3min 27sec), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S4G_MeUUZlI 

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     World's Deadliest - Fish "Shoots" Prey with Water, NatGeoWild, (1 min 52 sec), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BcLLB5vijfk

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     Archer Fish - Our Wild World - Amazing Fish Shoots Water Bullets at Insects, wildvisuals, (1 min 30 sec), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GhMi9Hw_wZ0

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     Archer Fish Water Pistol - Weird Nature - BBC, (3min 27sec), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S4G_MeUUZlI

[4] Refraction, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Refraction

[5] Mary Beth O'Leary, Archerfish target shoot with 'skillfully thrown' water, http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2014-09/cp-ats082814.php

#68 Symmetry

In this Proof for God, let’s take a look at “Symmetry” and think about all the symmetry in the world and whether or not it could have come about by randomness.

The dictionary definition of Symmetry is “the correspondence in size, form, and arrangement of parts on opposite sides of a plane, line, or point; regularity of form or arrangement in terms of like, reciprocal, or corresponding parts.”[1]

Everywhere you look, there is symmetry. The vast majority of things created by humans (intelligent beings) contain symmetry. Our vehicles, our furniture, our art, even our foods usually contain symmetry. Go into any type of retail store you can find and walk up and down the aisles and calculate the percentage of items that exhibit symmetry. It's clearly a very high percentage.

Nature too is full of symmetry. Almost every animal, bird, fish, insect, and even plant that I can think of contains symmetry.

You have two eyes, two ears, two nostrils, symmetrical teeth, two arms, two hands, two legs, two feet, and on and on. Even you have a lot of symmetry inside your body under your skin. All the way down to the microscopic level of the chemicals in your body, there is symmetry.

So here’s the big question, how could all of this totally dominant and overwhelming amount of symmetry come about if the original cause is random mutation. Start with something like an ameba in your mind and then imagine randomly adding appendages like arms or legs. The odds are very, very small that this process would produce any symmetry. That's by the definition of "random".

Now imagine the odds of getting exactly two arms in exactly symmetrical locations on both sides of the body. The odds are huge against getting just the two arms, but now you have to get two fully symmetrical hands at the end of those arms. Then you have to get two legs in symmetrical positions. That multiplies the odds exponentially. But we are just barely beginning. We still have to get two symmetrical eyes, and ears, and on and on. For each new symmetrical pair, multiply the odds exponentially higher.

The odds are impossibly high for getting just one eye. (See my Proof for God #45 The Eye  [2]) But in order to get two eyes randomly in exactly symmetrical positions on your face is astronomically more difficult. Why not imagine an eye randomly growing on the palm of one of your hands? Why couldn’t that happen within the principles of the Theory of Evolution? If Natural Selection were really in operation, that might just be a more ideal location than on your face. Evolution says everything developed gradually over great lengths of time. Then that must mean that one eye grew before the second eye grew, right? Two eyes (two arms, whatever) could not have suddenly appeared simultaneously because that is not slow and gradual.

Why not grow 3 or 4 arms? Wouldn’t that allow us to survive better? Why have arms just on the sides? Why not have an arm in the front and an arm in the back too?

Some animals ended up with exactly 4 legs (no arms and hands). Think about the odds of growing one leg, then a second leg, a third leg, and finally a fourth leg over many generations. Slow and gradual would mean one leg at a time and then we would have to wait at least a generation or two (or a hundred) before we could grow another leg. You can’t suddenly get 4 legs in one generation because that would seem to violate the Theory of Evolution. And also remember that the front legs are symmetrical side to side and so are the back legs, but they are usually not symmetrical front to back.

How about all the insects with 6 legs or spiders with 8 legs? How does the slow and gradual process explain 8 legs and the symmetry that is there? Why stop there? What about centipedes and millipedes. The record for most legs is the millipede which has 750 legs, all of them in symmetrical pairs.

Let’s think about birds. In the slow and gradual process of evolution, one arm or leg had to turn into a wing before the other one did, right? Birds could not have gotten two wings at the same time, in the same generation. Maybe it was many generations that birds had one wing and one leg before that leg started to change into a second wing in exactly the symmetrically opposite position on the other side of the body. If that second wing was misplaced by even a little bit, the bird would not be able to fly. It would just flop around generation after generation until both wings could balance each other out and could be coordinated so the bird could figure out how to fly with these two feathered appendages. That’s so silly.

But evolutionists must believe some version of the above scenarios. And they must believe that these impossibly complicated scenarios repeated themselves over and over again in hundreds of thousands of animals’ bodies, birds’ bodies, fish bodies, and insect bodies.

If random mutation were really the process by which all living species came into existence, then we would be looking all around us at way more craziness. There would not be much order at all. There would be very, very little symmetry.

If fact, what we see all around us is order. Thesaurus.com says that order is the opposite of random. Some antonyms (opposites) for the word, random, are “methodical, planned, systematic, definite, particular, and specific.” [3]

As I explained in my article on Mutation [4], (Proof for God #27) intelligent scientists have tried for 40 years to mutate a fairly simple species like a fruit fly into another species and they have not been able to do it. And they were trying on purpose. Smart people have been trying to do it, but without success. Therefore, it seems impossible to believe that mutation which man has never been able to cause on purpose could happen accidentally and end up producing all the incredibly complex species in the world.

The most simple and logical conclusion is that living species were designed by a super intelligence to be exactly the way that they are AND to NOT be able to be changed.

Scientists are constantly discovering new species never before seen and they estimate there are hundreds of thousands more, but never have they observed one species changing into another one. Surely they have been looking long and hard. Doesn’t it tell you something when the evidence is not there? Zip. Nada.

Another aspect of symmetry that needs to be mentioned is the inherent “Beauty”. Humans have an intellectual and spiritual ability to recognize order, harmony, and beauty in the universe. When we design things ourselves, we purposefully invest the qualities of order and beauty. Almost no one designs something on purpose that others would call ugly. It would never sell.

One of the most essential attributes of beauty is symmetry. So when we observe Nature and recognize the awesome symmetry and beauty that exists, it triggers in our mind and heart and appreciation of the creator of that beauty. That is a natural instinctive process.

If a person is unable to appreciate beauty, we would consider them to be handicapped in that way. We would feel sorry for them. Their life would seem dull, grey, sad, joyless, even “lifeless”, and pitiable. That’s what it must be like for those who sense the beauty around them but cannot appreciate the “heart” of the creator behind the beauty. For them everything came from nothing and randomness. There is no meaning and purpose bigger than themselves. How sad.

Symmetry is absolutely everywhere. Randomness is not everywhere; it’s difficult to find.

There has to be God.

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[1] Dictionary.Com. http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/symmetry

[2] Stephens, Jim, Proof For God #45 The Eye, http://101proofsforgod.blogspot.com/2013/11/45-eye.html

[3] Thesaurus.Com. Antonyms for “random”, http://www.thesaurus.com/browse/random

[4] Stephens, Jim, Proof For God #27, The Truth about Mutation, http://101proofsforgod.blogspot.com/2013/02/27-truth-about-mutation.html