Evolutionists Conclude Magnetoreception Evolved

After They Doubted its Very Existence

Many animals use a built-in sixth sense called magnetoreception to sense direction and even location as they travel long distances. These magnetoreception capabilities are highly sophisticated and, after many decades of research, scientists still have not unraveled the full story. But as a recent report explains, a barrage of ingenuous experiments have begun to piece together many important aspects of magnetoreception.

Anyone who has used a compass can imagine how animals might be able to sense direction. A compass uses the Earth’s magnetic field to show north, east, south and west. Perhaps animals have miniature bio-compasses hard-wired to their brains, giving them an innate sense of direction.

But that alone does not account for the incredible feats of navigation and travel animals perform. Loggerhead turtles, for instance, after swimming in the swirling currents of the North Atlantic gyre need to adjust their direction carefully at key locations to return to the American coast. They need to be able to sense the key locations, not just know the compass directions. Simply put, they need map information and the sensory data to determine where they are on the map. One possibility is that they use the angle which the magnetic field lines make with the Earth surface, along with intensity anomalies.

From loggerhead turtles and homing pigeons to monarch butterflies and rainbow trout, scientists are researching not only how magnetic signals are sensed but how they are later processed. By exposing animals to different magnetic field patterns and observing their behavior scientists can infer much about how the signals are processed. Scientists have even observed the specific neurons that respond to different field patterns indicating the specific patterns the animal is perceiving.

What has been more elusive, however, are the actual receptors that detect and report the magnetic field measurements. In birds, scientists had thought that these miniature marvels were in the upper beak. But that hypothesis was found to be false and other possible locations include eyes and the inner ear.

The research can be “maddeningly difficult,” as one writer put it. But that does not mean the scientists are slowing down. As one scientist explained: “[Magnetoreception] is a huge mystery. That’s what makes this such an exciting field. We simply don’t know how they do this, so it’s wide open to discovery.”

It is also another example of the failure of evolutionary theory. Not only is there no scientific explanation for how such magneto reception, processing and decision-making could evolve, but the entire idea runs counter to evolution. Fifty years ago evolutionists ridiculed the idea that animals could detect such weak signals and use them in a sort of geographic information service. Now they claim it is all a result of blind evolution. As one evolutionist explained regarding the loggerhead turtles, “We think different areas along the migratory pathway are marked by unique magnetic signatures, and the turtles have evolved responses that are coupled to these signatures.” They think that not because the turtle’s magnetoreception appears to be a product of evolution, or that they have anything close to a scientific explanation for how it could have evolved. They think that because they believe evolution is true.

That is the extent of evolution’s contribution to this research.