There Comes a Time

Live By the Sword, Die By the Sword

It happened this morning at 9:13 AM, a moment I shall never forget. The historians had always told us this day would come, but it just seemed impossible. Yes spontaneous origins seems absurd, they agreed, but the inexorable march of science will find it out. It always does. Don’t get in the way of science they warned, and now they have turned out right. And we are too loyal pupils of inductive philosophy to resist any conclusion by reason of its strangeness. Newton’s patient philosophy taught him to find in the falling apple the law which governs the silent movements of the stars in their courses. And if evolutionists can with the same correctness of reasoning demonstrate Epicureanism to be true, we shall dismiss our objections, and admit, with the characteristic humility of philosophy, our failed intuition that something does not come from nothing. All this ran through my mind as I read through Cynthia Moss’s new paper on bat evolution. It all seemed so contrived, but nonetheless, there it was:

Our observations demonstrate that the evolutionary progression that gave rise to the bat wing membrane has resulted in atypical somatosensory inputs, which have been co-opted to enhance flight control.

Evolutionists finally had hard facts to back up their claims. They now had scientific observations demonstrating the evolution of components of the bat wing. In fact, these are fantastically efficient and complex sensors detecting airflow over the wing and transmitting that information along the central nervous system as part of an incredible biological flight control system. As Moss explains in the above video, “Biology has done an exquisite job in creating these animals that can maneuver so agilely.” The paper further explained that “Bats achieve remarkable agility with modified forelimbs that serve as airfoils while retaining capacity for object manipulation.” Or as the press release put it, “Bats fly with breathtaking precision because their wings are equipped with highly sensitive touch sensors, cells that respond to even slight changes in airflow.” Such biological designs could even help engineers design air vehicles that better negotiate obstacles by sensing and adjusting to air turbulence.

It seems so amazing, yet now we know it all is nothing more than the product of blind mutations. In fact Moss’s paper had many more cogent observations. For example, the paper explains that the bat’s specialized airflow sensors evolved in order “to guide motor behaviors.” Also, the paper does not simply limit itself to bat evolution, but brilliantly concludes that vertebrate nervous systems, in general, “have flexibly adapted to accommodate anatomical specializations for flight.”

Needless to say all of this left me stunned. But I quickly began to see the truth of evolution. I simply had never conceived of the idea that things like sensors evolved in order to guide motor behaviors, or that entire nervous systems evolved in order to accommodate capabilities such as flight.

But once you shed your anti science bias, evolution provides these sorts of amazing explanations. Of course nervous systems evolved. They evolved to produce flight. How could I have ever doubted such obvious truths? It just goes to show how dangerous those science deniers are.