Those flitting and fluttering motions of the butterfly, long thought to be “primitive” and “inefficient” movements of a creature struggling to improve, are no such thing, according to David Catchpoole, an Australian physiologist with Answers in Genesis. After filming red admiral butterflies flying in a wind tunnel, Catchpoole writes that “researchers have been surprised by a whole range of complicated wing movements which generate more lift than simple flapping would do.”
What are those seemingly random movements called? According to R. B. Srygely and A. I. R. (no kidding) Thomas, in an article in Nature magazine, they are “wake capture, two different types of leading-edge vortex, active and inactive upstrokes, in addition to the use of rotational mechanisms and the Weis-Fogh ‘clap-and-fling’ mechanism.” In fact the red admirals often use completely different movements on successive strokes. And, wonder of wonders, there isn’t a butterfly in the world who can describe, explain, or is required to learn any of it.
The author notes: “The flight control center of a fly has been estimated at about 3,000 neurons, which ‘gives the insect less computational power than a toaster, yet insects are more agile than aircraft with superfast digital electronics.’” Even unbelieving modern man must occasionally stand agape at the marvels God has wrought.
QUOTE UNQUOTE
Dr. Michael Denton in Evolution, A Theory in Crisis: “Is it really credible that random processes could have constructed a reality, the smallest element of which—a functional protein or gene—is complex beyond our own creative capacities, a reality which is the very antithesis of chance, which excels in every sense anything produced by the intelligence of man?”
Stephen Jay Gould, Professor of Paleontology at Harvard in an article “Paleobiology” (Jan. 1980, p. 127): “The absence of fossil evidence for intermediary stages between major transitions in organic design, indeed our inability, even in our imagination, to construct functional intermediates in many cases, has been a persistent and nagging problem for gradualistic accounts of evolution.”
Professor Sir Edmund R. Leach, addressing the 1981 Annual Meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science: “Missing links in the sequence of fossil evidence were a worry to Darwin. He felt sure they would eventually turn up, but they are still missing and seem likely to remain so” (quoted in Nature, Sep. 3, 1981, pp. 19-20).
Charles Darwin: “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 the correction of spherical and chromatic aberrations, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree” (Origin of the Species, J. M. Dent and Sons, 1971 p. 167).
“SNAKE MAN” MEETS HIS MATCH
USA Today reported the death of Boonreung Buachan, age 34, who held the Guiness World Record for having spent the most time penned up with poisonous snakes. Boonreung was showing villagers in Thailand a new cobra when he was bitten. He paused only long enough to take some herbal medicine and a shot of whiskey before he continued the show. He collapsed soon after.