Living Together or Fighting Enemies by Divine Design

Fundamental Evangelistic Association

selected articles from:
^{^{^©}}FOUNDATION
A MAGAZINE OF BIBLICAL FUNDAMENTALISM
Dennis W. Costella, Editor; Karel Beyer, Production Manager; Matt Costella, Copy Editor
M.H. Reynolds, Jr. (1919-1997), Founding Editor

Living Together or Fighting Enemies by Design
Creation Esssay #17 by Robert Kofahl, Ph. D.
©FOUNDATION Magazine, Jan-Feb 2002

When members of two different species live together for mutual benefit, the relationship is called symbiosis. Many such relationships discovered by biologists utterly defy even the most imaginative attempts to explain their origin by chance evolution. These inexplicable relationships eloquently proclaim that scientists need to acknowledge the existence of the Creator if all things are to have a rational explanation.

The Dirty Fish That Blushes
     Consider the case of the quick-service fish-washing stations. The blushing fish of tropical seas provide a striking example of symbiosis. The marine tropical yellow-tailed goat fish, mostly white in color, swims in small schools. In common with most of the scaled fish, this species is bothered by infestations of parasites in its scales and gills, and from time to time these fish need cleaning jobs. When one of the fish needs such a cleaning, the small school swims over to a coral reef where small black and yellow French angel fish have set up a neighborhood fish wash station. When the dirty fish blushes a bright rust-red color, the little cleaner fish knows that the blushing fish wants a wash, not a fish dinner. He darts out, gives the blushing goat fish a good cleaning and then darts back into the safety of the coral. The blushing fish stops blushing, and the school swims away.¹
     Several dozen such cleaner relationships have been observed in tropical waters, involving a number of different species of small cleaner fish as well as various species of tiny, beautifully decorated cleaner shrimp. The cleaners are often eaten by the larger fish, so it is only after the proper signal is given that they will leave their protective lairs to venture out on cleaning missions. These signals, in addition to color change, include the adoption of an attitude of rest, with gills and fins flared or a vertical position in the water with head up and fins flapping.
     One researcher removed the cleaner shrimp from two coral heads and found that within two weeks there were fewer fish at these coral heads than at others in the area. The fish present often showed frayed fins and ulcerated sores. This strongly suggests that the cleaner relationships are essential for the larger fish and constitute an integral feature of the community life of the coral reef. The idea that such symbiotic arrangements could be evolved by mutations and natural selection, rather than having been intelligently designed and created, stretches the evolutionary imagination to the breaking point. Does not the evidence lead one to believe that these creatures were designed and created to help one another?

Ants In The Plants
     Another marvelous example of symbiosis is afforded by myrmecophytes, plants that are inhabited by ants. The South American Bull's horn acacia serves as the home of a species of fierce ants that are nourished by certain parts of the tree. In exchange, the ants protect the tree from all intruders, be they insects, birds or foraging animals. But even more amazing, these ants nip off and prune back any encroaching vines, bushes or other plants, thus maintaining ample growth space for their home tree. If the ants are removed from the tree, within two to fifteen months the tree is defoliated, gets overrun by neighboring plants and perishes .²Who taught these ants to be gardeners?

PREDATION AND DEFENSE

Slugs With Stolen Stingers
     Predation is combined with defense in a most amazing way by Eolidoidea, spurred nudibranchs, a type of sea slug that feeds primarily on sea anemones. But anemones are armed with tiny stinging cells that explode at the slightest touch and plunge their poisoned darts into any intruder. The sea slug, however, can violently tear an anemone apart, chew it up, swallow and digest it without either exploding or digesting the stinging cells. And the most fantastic part of this story is yet to come.
     Leading from the sea slug's stomach to small pouches in the fluffy spurs on its sides are very narrow channels lined with moving hairs, or cilia. The cilia sweep the stinging cells out of the stomach and up the channels to the pouches, where they are arranged and stored for the sea slug's defense. If an unwary fish should nip at a sea slug, it would be stung in the mouth by stinging cells that the hapless sea anemone had prepared for its own hunting and defense .³

Cyanide Is Good For The Millipede
     The millipede species Apheloria corrugate is a very clever chemist. On both sides of each segment of the body where a pair of legs is attached, subsurface glands produce a liquid containing the chemical compound mandelonitrile. When the millipede is attacked by ants or other enemies, it mixes the mandelonitrile with a catalyst, causing it to decompose to form benzaldehyde, a mild irritant, and hydrogen cyanide gas. Hydrogen cyanide is a deadly poison that has been used in the gas chamber to execute criminals. For chemistry enthusiasts the equation for the reaction is as follows:

OH

|

C₆H₅ – C – CN→ C₆H₅ – CHO + HCN

|

H

mandelonitrile → benzaldehyde + hydrogen cyanide

     There the millipede sits, happily basking in a cloud of lethal fumes, while his attackers flee in all directions. When the coast is clear, he crawls off, for some unknown reason, totally unaffected by his own deadly and almost universal poison .⁴

The Cowboy Fungus
     Another example of intelligent and purposeful design in living creatures is that of the predatory molds. There are many species of soil mold that capture and feed upon the tiny, exceedingly numerous nematode worms that inhabit the soil. Some of these molds grow sticky knobs with which they entrap the worms. But the star predatory mold species is Arthrobotrys dactyloides, which lassos its prey like a cowboy lassos steers. Only when nematodes are present in the soil does this mold grow tiny loops, each one formed of three cells. When a worm sticks its neck into one of the loops, within one-tenth of a second the loop cells swell, and the loop clamps shut on the worm, strangling it. The worm is then digested at leisure.⁵

Bird Navigators
     The navigational abilities of birds still hold mysteries for scientists. A species of warbler summers in Germany, where the young are raised. At the close of the season the parent birds depart for the headwaters of the Nile in Africa, leaving the young birds behind, for they are not yet ready for the long flight. A few weeks later the young birds take off and fly to Africa, traveling thousands of miles without a guide, over a path they have never seen, to join their parents. How do they accomplish this? One German scientist proved that they navigate by the stars.⁶ These birds are hatched from the egg with this ability and with the preprogrammed navigation and flight instructions already in their little bird brains.
     More recent research reveals that a pigeon has two independent mechanisms for determining direction. In sunny weather the pigeon tells direction by means of the sun, but in cloudy weather it tells direction by means of some kind of magnetic compass located somewhere in its head.⁷ The common pigeon guards an even more mysterious secret of navigation. It has knowledge of a map which it reads as it travels to its destination. This map is entirely independent of surface features of the earth, yet it is strangely influenced by the geographical location in which the bird finds itself. Scientists at Cornell University and other research centers are striving to learn the pigeon's secret. Recent research reveals that tiny crystals of magnetic iron oxide, incorporated in cells associated with the nervous systems of many species of birds and animals, are apparently used to detect the earth's magnetic field.
     Evolutionary science has absolutely no explanation as to how bird and animal navigation capabilities could have evolved. The reasonable explanation is that these creatures were designed this way by the Creator.

Spider Aquanauts
     Most spiders do not like water. They are dry land creatures. But Argyroneta lives under the water!⁸ These clever creatures live in little silken diving bells a foot or so under the surface of ponds and streams in Europe. At the surface, they capture bubbles of air, which cling to the hairs of their abdomens, and they fill their diving bells with bubbles brought down from the surface. The female Argyroneta lays her eggs in her diving bell, and the little spiderlets begin their life there beneath the surface. When they are ready to begin an independent life, they dart out into the water sheathed in a silvery bubble of air borrowed from their mother's diving-bell home. We challenge evolutionary science to come up with a rational explanation for the origin of Argyroneta.

FOOTNOTES

Roessler and Post, Natural History, May 1972, pp. 30-37.

Odum, Eugene P., Fundamentals of Ecology, 3rd Edition, W. B. Saunders Co., Philadelphia (1971), pp. 273-274.

Zeiller, Warren, Natural History, Dec. 1971, pp. 36-41.

Eisner and Eisner, Natural History, 74, Mar. 1965, pp. 30-37.

Pramer, David, Science, 144, No. 3617, April 24,1964, pp. 982-988.

Saur, E. G. F., Scientific American, 199. No. 2, Aug. 1958, p. 42; Emien, Stephen T., ibid., 233, Aug. 1975, pp. 102-111.

Palmer, J. D., Natural History, 76, Nov. 1967, pp. 54-57; Keeton, William T., Scientific American, 231, Dec. 1974, pp. 96-107.

Sisson, R. F., National Geographic, 141, May 1972, pp. 694-701.

Robert E Kofahl, Ph.D.,
21^st Century Creation Evangelism. E-mail: Truth4Free@aol.com

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