#88 The Waggle Dance of Honeybees

I think you are probably familiar with the game of Charades where one person tries to act out a phrase while other members of his/her team try to guess the meaning.

Let’s suppose that the message you are given to act out is the exact location of tonight’s dinner for everyone which it so happens is a couple of miles away.

Remember, you cannot speak and you cannot write. It’s pretty important that you can convey this information or you might all go hungry and eventually die.

Oh, and just to make it a little more tricky, let’s just say that we shrink your communication ability down to the level of a honeybee and similarly for those receiving the message.

Sounds really, really difficult, right? Well, just how do bees do it successfully all the time?

Please watch this National Geographic video (less than 2 minutes) to see a great summation of how they accomplish it. [1] As you might have guessed from the title, they do a little dance.

The Theory of Evolution might say that given millions of years and thousands of generations, the precise method to communicate where the food is located had to (1) accidentally get acted out one day by one honeybee in some way that was (2) correctly understood by another bee. The second one who understood the message, (3) flew off in the right direction and (4) to the right distance and found food. Somehow this accidental communication of information (5) was passed on to other bees in the hive and then (6) passed on to the next generation and ultimately (7) to all honeybees in the world.

I’m having a little trouble imagining that this could happen (sarcasm intended).

Around 40 years ago a scientist, named Karl von Frisch, a professor of zoology at the University of Munich in Germany, discovered the communication technique of honeybees. He set up a very ingenious experiment. He created two honeybee feeders and set them in totally different directions and distances from the hive. Then when bees eventually arrived at the feeders, he painted little spots on them so he knew which ones visited that feeder. He was able to film their actions inside the hive. That is when he discovered what has been named the Honeybee Waggle Dance. He was later given the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1973 for his work.

Wikipedia says, “Waggle dance is a term used in beekeeping and ethology for a particular figure-eight dance of the honey bee. By performing this dance, successful foragers can share, with other members of the colony, information about the direction and distance to patches of flowers yielding nectar and pollen, to water sources, or to new nest-site locations.” [2]

Von Frisch discovered that the honeybee will do a short wiggling dance in a straight line, then stop wiggling. It will swing around to the right and circle back to its original starting point for the dance and then do it all over again. However, the second time when it gets to the end, it will swing around to the left and circle back to the beginning point.

Von Frisch was able to determine that the precise axis the bee is traveling during the dance section tells the other bees the direction to fly in. He also discovered that the number of waggles during the dance was communicating the distance that they should fly.

“While running the straight-line course of the dance, the bee’s body, especially the abdomen, wags vigorously from side to side. This vibration of the body produces a tail-wagging motion. At the same time, the bee emits a buzzing sound, produced by wingbeats at a low audio frequency of 250 to 300 hertz or cycles per second.” [3]

But it is much more amazing than you might first think, although this is totally amazing already. The bee hive is usually built vertically. However, the direction that the bees have to fly will be a horizontal direction. Somehow the bee doing the dance has to be able to take the horizontal direction and distance information and convert it in her brain before she does the dance on a vertical surface. Also, the bees receiving the information have to be able to convert it in their brains back into the original information horizontally.

Von Frisch discovered that the dance being done on the vertical hive surface was using gravity as a reference point and that straight up represented the location of the sun and straight down represented 180 degrees away from the sun.

Here is an outstanding animated video from Georgia Tech College of Computing (7.5 minutes) that illustrates the experiments of Karl von Frisch and demonstrates how bees communicate. [4]

If the axis of the waggle dance was 30 degrees off of the vertical to the right, then the other bees were able to understand that they should take the position of the sun and then fly exactly 30 degrees to the right. Amazing that they can know the exact angle, right?

“The distance between hive and recruitment target is encoded in the duration of the waggle runs. The farther the target, the longer the waggle phase. The more excited the bee is about the location, the more rapidly it will waggle, so it will grab the attention of the observing bees, and try to convince them. If multiple bees are doing the waggle dance, it's a competition to convince the observing bees to follow their lead, and competing bees may even disrupt other bees' dances or fight each other off.” [5]

Now you must be smart enough to realize a big problem…namely the sun keeps moving all day long. Even more challenging is that the arc of the sun is not the same every day but changes in the sky according to the seasons. If the bees live south of the equator, you have to flip things over.

Not only does the sun moving in the sky make it difficult, but sometimes it is so cloudy that we can’t see the sun. Astoundingly, the bees are able to see ultraviolet light, which penetrates the cloud cover. 

So they can see the sun at all times. Not only that, but even more bewildering for a non-believer is that the honeybee’s eyes polarize the sunlight like polarized sunglasses. That means they can even more accurately identify the exact direction of the sun.

The bees have a finely tuned internal clock (Where did they get that?) so a dancing bee who has been in the darkness of the nest for a while somehow calculates where the sun is going to be when their fellow bees head off from the hive. The axis of its dance has to change because the sun moved in the sky. Not only that of course, but those leaving the hive are going to be continually calculating changes to the direction they should fly according to the amount of time that has elapsed and the change in position of the sun.

Here is another video. This one is loaded with film footage of bees at work and what their eyes are really seeing. (5min, 18sec.) [6]

The bee also communicates a second very important piece of information…the distance to fly to get to the food source. This is done by either the number of waggles or the length of time waggling. Researchers now estimate that one second of waggling equals one kilometer of distance. If the food source is close, there is no waggling at all, but just a circling around motion.

"While several variables of the waggle dance relate to distance (such as dance “tempo” or the duration of buzzing sounds), the duration of the straight-run portion of the dance, measured in seconds, is the simplest and most reliable indicator of distance. As the distance to the food source increases, the duration of the waggling portion of the dance (the “waggle run”) also increases. The relationship is roughly linear. For example, a forager that performs a waggle run that lasts 2.5 seconds is recruiting for a food source located about 2,625 meters away." [7]

But note that scientists have observed that if there is a strong headwind coming from the direction of the food source, the bee will have to fly a longer time to reach the destination. The waggle dance will last longer. This leads scientists to believe that the bees are not measuring the distance to fly but the amount of energy it takes to get to the food source.

The forager bees who do the waggle dance also bring back on their legs and abdomen some of the food source that has been discovered. So the other bees are able to sample what their goal is at the distant location. So smell may also be a strong component of the communication.

Scientists know the waggle dance is real, so bees really in fact can do this. However there is controversy about how much it is effectively used by other bees, with estimates as low as 10% of other bees actually using the data.

The simplest and most elegant explanation for the waggle dance is that it was designed by the Creator of the Universe, an unimaginably superior intelligence. If you decide against there being a Creator, then you have to posit some other explanation which must be based on pure accident and random happenstance coming together in a fortuitous way. Then another random accident brings another fortuitous result. This pattern repeats itself again and again, thousands or more accurately millions of times. Notwithstanding that this violates the laws of nature and probability, you must imagine and try to believe that’s how it happened because, voila, the truth is that scientists have now discovered these facts of how bees communicate using the waggle dance.

I’ll stick with, there must be a God.

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[1] National Geographic video, World’s Weirdest: Honeybee Dance Moves, http://video.nationalgeographic.com/video/weirdest-bees-dance

[2] Wikipedia, “Waggle Dance”, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waggle_dance

[3] N.C. State University, The Honey Bee Dance Language, http://www.cals.ncsu.edu/entomology/apiculture/pdfs/1.11%20copy.pdf

[4] Georgia Tech College of Computing, Video: The Waggle Dance of the Honeybee, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bFDGPgXtK-U

[5] Wikipedia, “Waggle Dance”, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waggle_dance

[6] wgbhstocksales Video: Bee Waggle Dance, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jc-mtUs-eis

[7] N.C. State University, The Honey Bee Dance Language, http://www.cals.ncsu.edu/entomology/apiculture/pdfs/1.11%20copy.pdf

#87 Pain

Thank God for pain...nobody ever said.

However, you are about to learn why we can in fact recognize that a loving God created us because we have the incredible ability that allows us to feel pain.

There are about 20 documented cases of American children born with a genetic defect called “congenital insensitivity to pain.” It makes them unable to feel pain. One parent called it a “living hell”.

“Congenital insensitivity to pain (CIP), also known as congenital analgesia, is one or more rare conditions in which a person cannot feel (and has never felt) physical pain. ... Despite sounding beneficial, it is actually an extremely dangerous condition.” [1]

Here is a link to the video of a little girl on Oprah’s show. “She poked out her own eye, chewed her skin raw and bit her tongue until it bled. Five-year-old Gabby Gingras feels no pain. As someone who has no nerves to carry the pain signal from her skin to her brain, she's one of the rarest little girls in the country.” [2]

There is also Ashlyn Blocker. “Ashlyn walked over and put her hands on the muffler. When she lifted them up the skin was seared away. There was one story about the fire ants that swarmed her in the backyard, biting her over a hundred times while she looked at them and yelled: “Bugs! Bugs!” There was the time she broke her ankle and ran around on it for two days before her parents realized something was wrong.” [3]

Here is a link to the story of Isaac Brown. [4] He broke his pelvis and did not know it. One day he was found pounding on a door with a piece of broken glass. No pain. He once put his hand on a hot stove burner. No pain. He had to be taught that “blood is bad”.

Dr. Stephen Waxman, a leading researcher on this condition, blames the problem on mutation and says that probably just one gene out of 30,000 has been messed up. [5] Evolutionists should listen to themselves if they say a mutation is what causes this horrendous problem. And then watch them try to say with total belief in Evolution that mutation is the miraculous process that gave us all good things.

At the beginning of May of this year, I hurt a vertebrae in my spine and was in bed for two and a half weeks with excruciating pain. During that time, I was not thanking God actually. But I did think a lot about pain. You would think that with two and half weeks in bed that I could get a lot of reading and such done. Not actually. I could only think in a straight line for a few seconds at a time. Then the pain would return and the only thing I could think of was how to adjust my body to alleviate some of the pain. I spent most of the time thinking about how to get out of pain. When you are in pain, it overrules everything else.

Our ability to feel pain is phenomenal in its complexity. It is unbelievable in its accuracy. The sensitivity to the damage, vicinity, and seriousness of an injury is way better than you could imagine if you designed it yourself.

There are several different pain receptors, but they, in fact, work together to report the intensity and severity of the damage that has been done. “Every square centimeter of your skin contains around 200 pain receptors but only 15 receptors for pressure, 6 for cold and 1 for warmth.” [6]

Think about that…200 receptors for pain in a square centimeter. Each one of them connected to your brain.

There are two different types of nerve cells lined up end to end that report pain to your brain. They even use completely different types of pathways to get to your brain. Two different centers in your brain do the interpretation of the pain signals.

“The conscious perception of pain probably takes place in the thalamus and lower centers; interpretation of the quality of pain is probably the role of the cerebral cortex.”[7]

In other words you have more than one system in your body for reporting pain. Think about how two systems to accomplish the same function could have possibly evolved separately and accidentally.

“Pain travels through redundant pathways, ensuring to inform the subject: “Get out of this situation immediately.” Without these attributes, the organism has no means to prevent or minimize tissue injury.” [8]

“Pain from the skin is transmitted through two types of nerve fibers. A-delta fibers relay sharp, pricking types of pain, while C fibers carry dull aches and burning sensations. Pain impulses are relayed to the spinal cord, where they interact with special neurons that transmit signals to the thalamus and other areas of the brain.” [9]

Wikipedia writers believe in Evolution and make this statement in their article, “human awareness of painful stimuli is an evolutionary necessity to avoid injury and death.” Well, duh.

But just exactly HOW does the Theory of Evolution describe the development of your pain recognition system? I did not find any answers to my question, only a lot of descriptions of the history of pain research. Evolution says there must have been a slow and gradual process of random mutations that were beneficial. So somehow a receptor for pain accidentally mutated into existence and that was beneficial enough to spread all over our bodies and then be inherited to all mankind.

Although, think about this, it must have taken millions of more mutations before the nerve chain (of hundreds or thousands of nerves) developed to get the signal to our brains which then somehow learned to recognize the signal as pain.

How could pain receptors somehow mutate everywhere, completely covering our bodies? But somehow they did not cover our bodies equally since certain areas have more receptors than others. Luckily the most pain receptors are in exactly the places where we need them most.

But the story is much more complicated. There are actually four different types of pain receptors in the skin. How could that evolve?

“Skin nociceptors (i.e. pain) may be divided into four categories based on function.

The first type is termed high threshold mechanonociceptors or specific nociceptors. These nociceptors respond only to intense mechanical stimulation such as pinching, cutting or stretching.

The second type is the thermal nociceptors, which respond to the above stimuli as well as to thermal stimuli. (i.e. hot or cold)

The third type is chemical nociceptors, which respond only to chemical substances.

A fourth type is known as polymodal nociceptors, which respond to high intensity stimuli such as mechanical, thermal and to chemical substances like the previous three types.” [10]

There is a great amount of research and information available if you want to continue to study about pain. For example, scientists have been able to distinguish 22 degrees of “Just Noticeable Differences” in applying heat to our skin. This article, as you can see is just scratching the surface.

Also it’s a fact your body has pain receptors everywhere, not only on your skin, but also in all of your joints, your arteries, and inside your body connected to all your various organs. There are different types of pain sensors in these areas as well. Did all this evolve slowly and gradually? Not likely.

"The distribution of pain receptors in the gastrointestinal mucosa apparently is similar to that in the skin; thus, the mucosa is quite sensitive to irritation and other painful stimuli. Although the parenchyma of the liver and the alveoli of the lungs are almost entirely insensitive to pain, the liver and bile ducts are extremely sensitive, as are the bronchi and parietal pleura." [11]

Let me highlight one more amazing ability we have which defies Evolution, our reflexes. If you put your hand on a hot surface, you will pull it off immediately, even before the signal gets to your brain. Similar reflexes exist connected to all of our pain receptors. The neurons from our pain receptors to our brains all go through our spinal cord. But there is a short circuit process if the pain is intense. There are nerves directly from the spine to our muscles that make them pull away from any pain source. Our brain is bypassed. Is there really a way for this to evolve slowly and gradually?

Nobody likes pain, but what an incredible blessing it is that we have the ability to feel it. If not, we would be constantly injuring ourselves in terrible ways and have really shortened lives. When we experience pain, we are strongly driven to do something about it and to get it to stop. Looking at the whole pain perceiving ability, it totally testifies to having been designed.

For a related study, read my Proof for God #70 Healing [12]. The process of healing is another total miracle that had to be designed.

There must be God.

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[1] Wikipedia, Congenital insensitivity to pain, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congenital_insensitivity_to_pain

[2] The Oprah Winfrey Show, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AqRcngt0-h0

[3] Heckertnov, Justin, The Hazards of Growing Up Painlessly, The New York Times Magazine. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/18/magazine/ashlyn-blocker-feels-no-pain.html?_r=0

[4] Mohney, Gillian, Good Morning America, Meet the Child Who Feels No Pain, Oct. 25, 2013,

http://abcnews.go.com/Health/meet-toddler-feels-pain/story?id=20658484

[5] Mohney, Gillian, Good Morning America, Meet the Child Who Feels No Pain, Oct. 25, 2013,

http://abcnews.go.com/Health/meet-toddler-feels-pain/story?id=20658484

[6] How Many Pain Receptors, http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/humanbody/body/factfiles/touch/touch.shtml

[7] Pain, http://medical-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/Pain+receptors

[8] Dafny, Nachum, Department of Neurobiology and Anatomy, The UT Medical School at Houston, "Pain Principles", http://neuroscience.uth.tmc.edu/s2/chapter06.html

[9] Touch, Article, http://psychology.jrank.org/pages/634/Touch.html

[10] Dafny, Nachum, Department of Neurobiology and Anatomy, The UT Medical School at Houston, "Pain Principles", http://neuroscience.uth.tmc.edu/s2/chapter06.html

[11] Pain, http://medical-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/Pain+receptors

[12] Stephens, Jim, Proof for God #70 Healing, http://101proofsforgod.blogspot.com/2014/10/70-healing.html

#86 The Tongue

One of the most amazing and powerful muscles in the human body is the tongue. Without it we would hardly be able to speak and communicate, let alone something like singing.

Besides that, our tongue greatly facilitates our ability to eat because it moves the food around in our mouths while chewing. Try eating without using your tongue sometime.

It also just so happens that our tongue contains all of our taste buds which send signals to our brain letting us know if our food is sweet, sour, salty, bitter, or umami (now being intensely studied). Imagine your life without your taste buds every day at every meal and every snack in between.

Evolutionists do not have an explanation for the origin of the tongue. They also have a hard time explaining how a somewhat similar organ accidentally developed in many, many totally unrelated species on the so-called “tree of life”. Reptiles have long tongues for snatching their next meal out of the air. Snakes have a forked tongue that also allows them to smell. Butterflies have a proboscis that unfurls and gets inserted into flowers to suck up nectar. The Blue Whale has the biggest tongue, weighing in at almost 6,000 pounds. [1] It certainly looks like there was some intelligent planning going on.

The human tongue is composed of eight different muscles. How wonderful that they decided to work together in harmony. If you refer back to my Proof for God #61 Muscles [2], you will read that scientists have no explanation for where muscles could have originated. Muscles are that unique.

Four of the eight muscles are attached to bones. They are called “extrinsic” [3]. These muscles allow you to move your tongue out and then back in, and side to side and back again to the middle. It certainly is a wonderful accident (for atheists) that we developed a muscle that pulls the tongue back in after we stick it out. Otherwise we’d be stuck with our tongue out all day. I’m sure the muscle that pulls the tongue in must have evolved second. If the tongue never sticks out, there would be no benefit for developing a muscle to pull it back in.

The other four muscles in the tongue are called “intrinsic”. “These muscles alter the shape of the tongue by: lengthening and shortening it, curling and uncurling its apex and edges, and flattening and rounding its surface. This provides shape, and helps facilitate speech, swallowing, and eating.” [4]

The astounding property of these muscles is that there are no other muscles like them in the human body. Scientists don’t know where they came from and don’t know much about how they work either. The only similar muscles like them are found in the legs of an octopus.

"The human tongue is a very different muscular system than the rest of the human body," Khalil Iskarous, an assistant professor of linguistics at the University of Southern California who is helping to lead the research, said in a prepared statement. "Our bodies are vertebrate mechanisms that operate by muscle working on bone to move. The tongue is in a different muscular family, much like an invertebrate. It's entirely muscle — it's muscle moving muscle." Both move by compressing fluid in one section of a muscle, creating movement in another part. But we know little about exactly how that movement is initiated and so finely controlled.” [5]

If you look at the underside of someone’s tongue, you will see lots of blood vessels. These are needed to constantly supply the muscles of the tongue because it is always working. Even when you are sleeping your tongue is working. You wouldn’t have a tongue without those blood vessels, so how do evolutionists explain the accidental mutations that had to evolve both the muscles and blood vessels simultaneously.

“When we swallow, we stop breathing, and a stiff little flap attached to the back of our tongue covers the top of the trachea, so that food slides down and into our stomachs and not into our lungs. That flap is called the epiglottis.” [6] Can evolutionists explain the process of slow and gradual development of the epiglottis? If you don’t have the whole thing in place from the beginning, you would constantly be choking on your food.

You have of course heard of fingerprints. Well, you also have a “tongue-print” that is totally unique to you among all human beings. [7]

“Your mouth is the home of 600 different types of bacteria and a single saliva drop contains 1 million of those bacteria.” [8]

I imagine that atheists must feel very grateful for the extremely long series of fortuitous accidents that allows them to be able to talk. In an astounding coincidence to the evolution of a tongue, we also evolved the larynx right at the top of the tube going to our lungs where air could be exhaled over it to make various sounds. The mouth also evolved into a very convenient shape that allows the three working together to make a tremendous variation of sounds. Those sounds get accidentally heard by the ears of other humans, who luckily evolved ears. 

All those variations of sounds could be repeated and repeated until the other person began to figure out that they actually meant something intelligent. Atheists refuse to see any intelligent planning behind all this. They insist that for every small incremental and accidental mutation at the DNA level there must have been some benefit to the new DNA so that it was “selected” by a natural (i.e. godless) law. It won out over all other DNA patterns until the next slight change. Either the larynx, tongue, and mouth developed simultaneously or they developed sequentially, but in the end we could talk and others could listen.    

As you can probably tell, I’m having trouble taking the theory of evolution seriously.

What is the explanation for how taste buds evolved? They are so small you can’t even see them.

“Each taste bud is made up of taste cells, which have sensitive, microscopic hairs called microvilli. Those tiny hairs send messages to the brain, which interprets the signals and identifies the taste for you.” [9]

The average tongue has between 2,000 and 10,000 taste buds. Each taste bud has about 15 receptacles that send the signals about taste to your brain. Every 10 to 14 days, your taste buds die off and are replaced with new ones. [10] Thank God or cosmic accidents for that DNA mutation!

It’s really wonderful that taste buds accidentally would evolve on your tongue rather than your toe, or your fingertip, or your elbow. In fact, they are mostly found on the top side of your tongue with a few others underneath your tongue, on your lips, or in your cheeks. [11] There are five different kinds of taste buds. Now how did that evolve? And miraculously they all happen to be on or around your tongue. How great is that?

None of your taste buds work unless they are in a moist environment. That’s a nice coincidence too because your mouth is a moist environment. In fact, the tongue is covered with a mucous membrane and even has saliva glands to keep the tongue moist. By doing just a little research on the chemical process that happens between the chemicals in our food and their stimulation of our taste buds, we find that the whole process inside the receptors is incredibly complex. I think evolutionists have a problem explaining this too.

If you put something sweet in your mouth, the taste receptor for sweet gets triggered and sends an electrical signal all the way to a specific location in your brain. Luckily there is a really, really long chain of nerves that accidentally connects your taste receptor to your brain. It’s really lucky or we would never know what sweet is.

I’m guessing that sweet taste buds would have had to be the first to evolve because they are our favorite. Then after tens of thousands of years there was an accidental mutation and another and another and finally we had a new taste, maybe “salty” or “sour”. I’m pretty sure “bitter” would come last. Then it happened again, and again, and again until there are finally five different tastes. Wow. Is that believable?

How wonderful and amazingly lucky that we have all those taste buds or else eating would be mighty, mighty dull. Also it’s a fantastic coincidence (for atheists) that it just so happens that the food that evolved  out there in the world just happens to trigger the taste buds that evolved and we end up with delicious tastes. Not only delicious but nutritious too. If the food out there tasted terrible and wasn’t healthy for us, we would never eat it and hence never have energy to keep on living and evolve. Then we wouldn’t be here.

This is just too many lucky accidents for me to believe in.

There must be God.

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[1] Fun Tongue Facts for Kids, http://www.sciencekids.co.nz/sciencefacts/humanbody/tongue.html

[2] Jim Stephens, Proof for God #61 Muscles, http://101proofsforgod.blogspot.com/2014/05/61-muscles.html

[3] Wikipedia, Tongue, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tongue

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

[5] Katherine Harmon Courage, Octopus Arms, Human Tongues Intertwine for Science, Scientific American, http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/octopus-chronicles/octopus-arms-human-tongues-intertwine-for-science/

[6] Health Topics for Kids, Introducing Your Tongue, http://www.cyh.com/HealthTopics/HealthTopicDetailsKids.aspx?p=335&np=152&id=1832

[7] Sankalan Baidya, 20 Interesting Human Tongue Facts, http://factslegend.org/20-interesting-human-tongue-facts/

[8] Sankalan Baidya, 20 Interesting Human Tongue Facts, http://factslegend.org/20-interesting-human-tongue-facts/

[9] Steven Dowshen, Your Tongue, http://kidshealth.org/kid/htbw/tongue.html

[10] Sarah Klein, 8 Things You Probably Didn't Know About Your Tongue, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/10/11/tongue-facts-health-info_n_5952850.html

[11] Sankalan Baidya, 20 Interesting Human Tongue Facts, http://factslegend.org/20-interesting-human-tongue-facts/

#85 Spontaneous Generation

It’s funny that I remember learning about Spontaneous Generation way back in grade school or middle school because I don’t remember much else from those days. But I remember the teacher saying that people used to believe that if you put an old shirt outside with some seeds in it that in a few weeks you would spontaneously create mice out of the shirt and seeds. How foolish they were. I was laughing inside that we are so much smarter these days.

As a matter of fact, Spontaneous Generation is known to have been believed as far back as the 4^th century BC and up until the middle 1800’s. It was famously explained by Aristotle.

“So with animals, some spring from parent animals according to their kind, whilst others grow spontaneously and not from kindred stock; and of these instances of spontaneous generation some come from putrefying earth or vegetable matter, as is the case with a number of insects, while others are spontaneously generated in the inside of animals out of the secretions of their several organs.”

—Aristotle, History of Animals, Book V, Part 1 [1]

Spontaneous Generation is the belief that life can be created in a very short period of time, almost spontaneously, if given the right conditions. Here are some examples.

“For example, a seventeenth century recipe for the spontaneous production of mice required placing sweaty underwear and husks of wheat in an open-mouthed jar, then waiting for about 21 days, during which time it was alleged that the sweat from the underwear would penetrate the husks of wheat, changing them into mice. Although such a concept may seem laughable today, it is consistent with the other widely held cultural and religious beliefs of the time.” [2]

“Many believed in spontaneous generation because it explained such occurrences as the appearance of maggots on decaying meat.” [3]

“Crucial to this doctrine is the idea that life comes from non-life, with the conditions, and that no causal agent is needed (i.e. Parent). Such hypothetical processes sometimes are referred to as abiogenesis, in which life routinely emerges from non-living matter on a time scale of anything from minutes to weeks, or perhaps a season or so.” [4]

It was not until 1859 because of an ingenious experiment by Louis Pasteur that science began to realize that life does not occur by Spontaneous Generation. In 1864 Pasteur came up with his declaration that “all life is from life”. It has become known as the Law of Biogenesis.

“The law of biogenesis, attributed to Louis Pasteur, is the observation that living things come only from other living things, by reproduction (e.g. a spider lays eggs, which develop into spiders). That is, life does not arise from non-living material, which was the position held by spontaneous generation. This is summarized in the phrase "all life [is] from life." A related statement is "all cells [are] from cells;" this observation is one of the central statements of cell theory.” [5]

“For more than one hundred years, biologists have taught that spontaneous generation of life from non-living matter was disproven by the work of Redi, Spallanzani, and ultimately Pasteur. This work was so conclusive; that biology codified the "Law of Biogenesis," which states that life only comes from previously existing life. Although, this doesn't prove absolutely that life couldn't ever have generated itself from non-living matter because it is impossible to prove a universal negative. However, the Law of Biogenesis is just as solid as the Law of Gravity. (emphasis added. Ed.) Even though we accept the law of gravity, we cannot prove that if you continued to drop apples forever, that at one point, one apple may not fall.” [6]

“Spontaneous generation is the incorrect hypothesis that nonliving things are capable of producing life.” [7]

Well, well, we seem to have a dilemma. Evolutionists want us to believe, as they do, that a long time ago, life suddenly and spontaneously sprang from chemicals. That would seem to contradict the Law of Biogenesis and all established science since the 1850’s.

Atheists and Evolutionists are clever folks of course and they know they have a problem, namely there is no such thing as Spontaneous Generation, even on the bacterial level. So what do they conclude when all scientific evidence is against them? They conclude there really was Spontaneous Generation a long time ago and Pasteur didn’t really disprove it. Besides that, Darwin wasn’t really talking about the origin of life. Others have taken care of that argument, or not, sort of.

“So we must ask - what did Pasteur prove? Did he prove that no life can ever come from non-living things? No, he didn't, and this is because you cannot disprove something like that experimentally, only theoretically, and he had no theory of molecular biology to establish this claim. What he showed was that it was highly unlikely that modern living organisms arose from non-living organic material. This is a much more restricted claim than that primitive life once arose from non-living non-organic material.” [8]

“1. Pasteur did not disprove the origin of life by natural means, and the saying "all cells from cells" was not intended to cover the initial period of life on earth. Darwin did not propose a theory of the origin of life in the beginning.

2. Evolutionary theory was not proposed to account for the origins of living beings, only the process of change once life exists. However, many have thought that the theory of evolution logically requires a beginning of life, which is true. Of those, many have thought that a natural account of the origin of life is necessary, and some have proposed models which have borne up or not as research proceeds.” [9]

So what did Darwin really "prove", huh, using this reasoning? Did rocks come alive? The Theory of Evolution does require a beginning of life and it does not provide an explanation. In fact no scientific experiment has ever shown that one species can evolve into a different one

Scientists say there is no Spontaneous Generation. “All life is from life.” I say so too. God is alive and God generated life. It didn’t happen accidentally from chemicals or non-living matter.

There must be God.

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[1] Wikipedia, "Spontaneous generation", http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spontaneous_generation

[2] Russell Levine and Chris Evers, "The Slow Death of Spontaneous Generation", http://www.accessexcellence.org/RC/AB/BC/Spontaneous_Generation.php

[3] Spontaneous Generation, Encyclopaedia Britannica, http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/560859/spontaneous-generation 

[4] Wikipedia, "Spontaneous generation", http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spontaneous_generation

[5] Wikipedia, “Biogenesis”, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biogenesis

[6] What is Spontaneous Generation, http://www.allaboutscience.org/what-is-spontaneous-generation-faq.htm

[7] Origin of Life, Spontaneous Generation, http://www.infoplease.com/cig/biology/spontaneous-generation.html

[8] John S. Wilkins, "Spontaneous Generation and the Origin of Life", http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/abioprob/spontaneous-generation.html

[9] John S. Wilkins, "Spontaneous Generation and the Origin of Life", http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/abioprob/spontaneous-generation.html

#84 Homing Pigeons

I’ve always felt a fascination with the concept of a homing pigeon. There is something somehow very noble about “returning to your home.” One of the most famous movie lines is “ET, go home!”

We all somewhere deep in our hearts have a yearning to “go home.” Buried deep in our souls, the essence of our being, something is flickering. We want to “return home.” What is that? For me it means returning to the God who created me. I believe we have all been separated from our source, or original love.

So this proof, #84, is about Homing Pigeons. I’m sure you have heard of them. Maybe you don’t know that they are a huge worldwide sport. Millions of people train them and have big races with them for big prizes.

"Pigeons are incredibly complex and intelligent animals. They are one of only a small number of species to pass the ‘mirror test’ – a test of self-recognition. They can also recognize each letter of the human alphabet, differentiate between photographs, and even distinguish different humans within a photograph." [1]

"Researchers in England devised incredibly complex devices to test the intelligence of all types of birds. Pigeons came out on top." [2]

"Pigeons have strong muscles used for flying. They can fly at the altitude of 6,000 feet. Pigeons can move their wings ten times per second and maintain heartbeats at the rate of 600 times per minute, during a period of 16 hours. Pigeons can fly at the speed of 50 to 60 miles per hour. The fastest known pigeon managed to reach a speed on 92 miles per hour. Because of their incredible speed and endurance, pigeons are used for racing. The Winner of a 400 miles long race can earn a million dollars." [3] About 5 such races are held each year somewhere in the world.

  

“In modern times the pigeon has been used to great effect during wartime. In both the First and Second World Wars the pigeon saved hundreds of thousands of human lives by carrying messages across enemy lines.” [4] Pigeons have been carrying messages for humans as far back as 500BC. New evidence suggests they were domesticated by Egyptians some 12,000 years ago. [5]

Pigeons trained for racing often fly about 700 miles in a day. [6] The longest distance ever recorded was in the late 1800’s for a homing pigeon that flew over 7,000 miles back home, going from Africa to England, taking over 55 days.

How can the Theory of Evolution (or any other theory without God) explain the development of this ability of a simple bird to find its way home? Even more so, how could this have developed over a slow and gradual process taking generations and generations of mutations and natural selection?

Birds have to find food each day to survive regardless of where they happen to be. Why not just stay there? How does natural selection choose a place far, far away as more beneficial? What’s the benefit? Especially if they have never been to that other place before, it could not be selected. And if they started out in the other place, how did they get so lost?

Travel over a long distance is dangerous and risky. It’s not likely to be a choice of some unintelligent law of natural selection when compared to staying in one place if there is food. What other criteria could exist for unintelligent selection, perhaps shelter or reproduction? Neither is likely to cause the “homing” ability we are discussing to be able to develop.

Another issue is concerning the exact mechanism that allows them to be able to “go home.” Various theories exist but no one really knows for sure! Not yet anyway.

Researchers originally thought they had some “map” in their brains and they relied on the magnetic fields of the earth. But scientists have been able to design ways to shield them from the magnetic fields and also to disable the parts of their brains that are sensitive to it. Still they could “go home.” So that may be a dead end.

"Although magnetic effects on pigeon orientation, provide indirect evidence for a magnetic ‘map’, numerous conditioning experiments have failed to demonstrate reproducible responses to magnetic fields by pigeons." [7]

The latest approach is focused on their ability to smell their way home. No kidding. I have a hard time comprehending the ability of a bird to smell its way for hundreds, if not thousands, of miles. I believe God can create some amazing creatures, but they didn’t come into existence by accident.

“The researchers saddled a group of homing pigeons with GPS tracking devices, placed a rubber plug in either their right or left nostrils, and released them 25 miles outside of their home in Pisa, Italy. Pigeons with their left nostrils blocked had a little more trouble navigating than clear-nosed pigeons, but eventually made it home. Birds with their right nostrils blocked made it back, too, but they stopped more often and took an even more circular route than the others. The researchers believe that the birds needed time to gather more smells and construct a map based on odors in the wind. And the finding that the right nostril is the better sniffer suggests that the right and left hemispheres of bird brains have different functions.” [8]

Other scientists believe pigeons have ears that can hear the sound of wind over mountains hundreds of miles away. This may be of help in guiding them. Research shows they do actually hear sounds 11 octaves below middle C which is in the range to detect earthquakes and electrical storms.[9]

To believe that pigeons accidentally evolved such a homing mechanism which is so complicated that research scientists cannot understand it takes astounding faith. Think about what is going on in that pigeon’s brain for a few minutes. (Recommended reading for more understanding: “For Everything a Reason: Why Ants Walk Crooked and Pigeons Circle Around” [10]). If a pigeon brain is using smells or hearing or the earth’s magnetic fields, it must be able to #1 differentiate very tiny, tiny variations. And it must be able to #2 assign meaning to the differences. Then it must be able to #3 make a decision how to prioritize the data. Then finally the pigeon brain must be able to #4 initiate its own actions based on its analysis. Wow.

All the above arguments should be convincing enough that God created pigeons, but I have one last, and I think, best argument. Think about this: Pigeons in the wild never use a long distance “homing” ability. They never get lost.

They don’t need this ability in the wild. Why not? They live, eat, grow old, and die in the areas where they are born. Natural selection cannot explain the development of an ability that is never used and has no survival value.

Homing pigeons don’t get lost hundreds of miles from home and then have to search for home. This only happens because of interference by men and women. Amazingly, homing pigeons somehow have incredible capability that they would never normally use in the wild. They only use it when they receive training from people who have learned how to train them.

Homing pigeons must be trained step by step. [11] You first have to train them by acclimating them to the desired “home” or roost. You must keep them locked up for at least 4 weeks. Then gradually take them farther and farther away and see if they can make it back home. Some do, some don’t. If you attach a GPS tracker and let them go at the same distant location many times, you will see that they take many different routes home, but gradually get better and better at it.

Pigeons in the wild never needed to develop the ability to “go home” by natural selection or mutation or any other reason because they were always already home. So how could they ever develop an ability that was never put to use in any way. There is no survival value in it. Pigeons in the wild don’t ever wander hundreds of miles from their home AND GET LOST. The ability is useless to them in the wild, but nonetheless they have this ability. That it would or could develop by evolution does not make any sense.

Natural selection requires that an ability get passed from generation to generation because of being selected by survival of the fittest. If the “go home” ability is never used, how could it get passed from generation to generation by natural selection? There is no survival value.

The homing ability of the pigeon is a creation of God that is a teaching tool for us. It shows us what we have in our own souls. We have an innate, undeniable, un-erasable desire to “go home.” Where is home? It is back to God.

There must be God. God is our home and we are all going there.

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[1] Facts about pigeons, OneKind.Org, http://www.onekind.org/be_inspired/animals_a_z/pigeon/ * Only 6 species can pass the mirror test, all mammals except for the pigeon.

[2] Answers to the Urban Wildlife Society's Gee Whiz Animal Quiz, http://www.urbanwildlifesociety.org/UWS/GeeWhizQuizAnswers.htm

[3] Pigeon Facts, Softschools.com, http://www.softschools.com/facts/animals/pigeon_facts/589/

[4] 21 Amazing Facts About Pigeons, Pigeon Control Resource Centre, http://www.pigeoncontrolresourcecentre.org/html/amazing-pigeon-facts.html

[5] Answers to the Urban Wildlife Society's Gee Whiz Animal Quiz, http://www.urbanwildlifesociety.org/UWS/GeeWhizQuizAnswers.htm

[6] Pigeon Facts: Did You Know???, http://www.fbipigeons.com/PIGEON%20FACTS.htm

[7] Mora, Davison, Wild, & Walker, "Magnetoreception and its trigeminal mediation in the homing pigeon", Nature: International weekly journal of science, October, 2004, http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v432/n7016/full/nature03077.html

[8] Reardon, Sara, Staff Writer: ScienceShot: Homing Pigeons Follow Their Noses, January 2011, http://news.sciencemag.org/2011/01/scienceshot-homing-pigeons-follow-their-noses

[9] Pigeon Facts: Did You Know???, http://www.fbipigeons.com/PIGEON%20FACTS.htm

[10] For Everything a Reason: Why Ants Walk Crooked and Pigeons Circle Around,

Evolution News & Views, December 13, 2013, http://www.evolutionnews.org/2013/12/for_everything080121.html#sthash.vGlgPO81.dpuf

[11] How To Train a Homing Pigeon, Wikihow, http://www.wikihow.com/Train-a-Homing-Pigeon