Contents Menu

• Darwin Contents
• Introduction
• Edward Blyth
• The Untold Story
• Darwin at Nuremberg
• A Better View
• Summary
• Creation Scientists List
• Scope "Monkey Trial"

THE DARWIN PAPERS: VOLUME 1 - NUMBER II

EDWARD BLYTH(1)

From The Nebulous Hypothesis:
A Study of the Philosophical and
Historical Implications of Darwinian Theory
© 1996 by James M. Foard
Editor and Publisher James M. Foard.
The Darwin Papers may be freely
copied and distributed for non profit use.

One forgotten chapter in history, neglected by most of Darwin's biographers, concerns a gentleman by the name of Edward Blyth. Blyth was a chemist in South London, a year younger than Darwin, but unlike Charles Darwin, Edward Blyth had not been born into wealth. His father died when he was ten, leaving his widowed mother to raise four children. She managed to send her eldest son, Edward, to school where he excelled in chemistry and natural history, spending his every spare moment at the British Museum.

His sister said of him, "Never was any youth more industrious; up at three or four in the morning, reading, making notes, sketching bones, coloring maps, stuffing birds by the hundred, collecting butterflies, and beetles-teaching himself German sufficiently to translate it readily, singing always merrily at intervals."(2)

Blyth spoke often at scientific meetings in London in the same circles that Darwin frequented, expounding theories quite similar to Darwin's own later writings. From 1835 through 1837 he published some articles dealing with the subject of natural selection in The British Magazine of Natural History, and it is evident that Darwin received copies of this magazine while in Peru in 1835 during his voyage on the Beagle. (3)

Loren Eisely has shown in Darwin and the Mysterious Mr. X. that not only was it obvious that Darwin had been quite familiar with Blyth's writings but that Darwin was to use many of Blyth's ideas years later on when writing his Origin, yet he had given Blyth little or no acknowledgment. (4)

Eisely makes mention of the fact that all of Darwin's major ideas - the struggle for survival, variation, and natural selection - were fully expressed in Blyth's first paper of 1835, yet Darwin was strangely reluctant to give Blyth any credit at all for this.(5)

It is also rather mysterious that large parts of Darwin's personal notes during this period in 1835 reflected his familiarity with Blyth's writings, and yet fifty pages of Darwin's notebook from this time are missing, with the cryptic reference "All useful pages cut out,"(6)added by Darwin in 1856. Darwin's own copy of Magazine of Natural History in 1837 showed that he made use of Blyth's paper of that year, the same year when he first claimed to have come up with the idea of natural selection on his own,(7)wherein Blyth had written essentially the same basic doctrine that Darwin took credit for.(8)

Eiseley wrote, "At that moment, probably in 1837, the Origin was born."

Francis Hitching mentioned that Eiseley had chronicled quite substantial portions of Darwin's writings that were nearly "word for word identical between Darwin and Blyth"" although Blyth's ideas preceded Darwin's publication of The Origin by over twenty years.(9)

A significant difference between the writings of Charles Darwin and Edward Blyth was that Blyth was an ardent creationist, and his papers simply flowed with his sense of awe and reverence for the God of creation who had so wonderously and wisely made all of His creatures. Francis Hitching wrote: "Darwin took everything Blyth had said and used it to support an opposite conclusion"(10) i.e. the denial of the miraculous and of special creation. Darwin changed natural selection around to mean evolutionary descent of all beings from a common ancestor, which was never Blyth's original contention at all.

Janet Browne wrote of Darwin: "There was a sliver of ice inside enabling him to make the most of all the advantages he possessed and the circumstances in which he found himself."(11)

Samuel Butler was a contemporary of Darwin and was the grandson of Darwin's old headmaster at Shrewsbury. He had been a former admirer of him until he read the work of earlier evolutionists like Lamarck and Buffon, then he launched an attack on Darwin's early claim to having originated his theories on his own, first in a book titled Evolution Old and New published in May of 1879, then in a letter to the Athenaeum on the 31st of January, 1880. Later he renewed the attack in another book titled Unconcious Memory, in which he documented Darwin's "borrowing" much of his work from others.

World famous geneticist and anthropologist, C.D. Darlington, although he doesn't come right out and say it, still comes about as close as one could get to accusing Darwin of plagiarism without actually spelling it out. He said that Darwin "was able to put across his ideas not so much because of his scientific integrity, but because of his opportunism, his equivocation and his lack of historical sense. Though his admirers will not like to believe it, he accomplished his revolution by personal weakness and strategic talent more than by scientific virtue" (16)

Blyth was eventually appointed as the curator of the Museum of the Royal Asiatic Society of Bengal, in India, where he lived for many years on a meager stipend. His personal life was marred with tragedy. In 1854 he married a Mrs. Hodges, a young widow visiting relatives in India, whom he had known previously in England when she had been single. She was to die within the space of three years after their wedding.

Arthur Grote, Blyth's friend and colleague, wrote "In December 1857, Blyth had the misfortune to lose his wife. His short married life had been of the happiest, and the blow fell heavily on him. His letters to his sister for the early months of 1858 are painful to read. The shock proved too much for him, and brought on a serious attack of illness . . .(17)

A few years after the death of Blyth's wife, when Darwin was famous and wealthy from the publication of his Origin and from his family inheritance while Blyth was living in obscurity and poverty, Darwin casually mentioned Blyth's situation in a letter to his friend Lyell in 1860: "I have had a letter from poor Blyth of Calcutta, who is much disappointed at hearing Lord Canning will not grant any money . . ." and then he made this remarkable admission ". . . Blyth says (and he is in many respects a very good judge) that his ideas on species are quite revolutionary.. ."(18)

Blyth never fully recovered from the loss of his wife. He remained in poor health for the rest of his days. He was remembered by his contemporaries as having a prodigious memory, and his friend Grote wrote eloquently of him in a eulogy: "The warmth and freshness of his feelings which first inspired him with the love of nature clung to him through his chequered life, and kept him on good terms with the world, which punished him . . . Few men who have written so much have left in their writings so little that is bitter. No man that I have ever known was so free as he was from the spirit of intolerance; and the absence of this is a marked feature in all his controversial papers. All too that he knew was at the service of everybody . . ." (19)

Loren Eisely wrote: "But let the world not forget that Edward Blyth, a man of poverty and bad fortune, shaped a key that dropped half-used from his hands when he set forth hastily on his own ill-fated voyage. That key, which was picked up and reforged by a far greater and more cunning hand, was no less than natural selection"(20)

When Blyth died in London on December 27, 1873, found among his papers was a fragment of an old manuscript that he had once been preparing, titled "On the Origin of Species" (21)

Natural selection is the main process that Darwin said accounted for his theory of evolution to work. How did Darwin say that this process of natural selection takes place? Let all of those who are concerned with protecting endangered species and animal rights gather 'round and pay very close attention to this little gem from the pen of Charles Darwin, where he expounds on his idea of how this process takes place: "I endeavored, also to show that intermediate varieties, from existing in lesser numbers than the forms which they connect, will generally be beaten out and exterminated during the course of further modification and improvement."(24)

  So we see Darwin's reason as to why those bothersome missing links aren't found to support his theory (see Chapter 4), as well as what happens to any other varieties of species that aren't quite fit enough to compete with other species in the struggle for survival; they just get wiped out, and Darwin considered this an "improvement."

This shouldn't come as so much of a surprise from someone whose favorite pastime during his college years was shooting birds at random, and who went on a bloody spree clubbing birds to death during his voyage on the Beagle.

This was Darwin's sentence on the baby harp seals, the blue whale, African rhino and the mountain gorilla: they will all get beaten into extinction during the course of "further modification and improvement.

He further wrote in his Origin: "As natural selection acts solely by the preservation of profitable modifications, each new form will tend in a fully-stocked country to take the place of, and finally exterminate, its own less improved parent-form and other less favoured forms with which it comes into competition. Thus extinction and natural selection go hand in hand." (Origin, Chapter Vl, On the Absences or Rarity of Transitional Varieties, pp.80, Benton Edition, 1952).

Darwin summed up his viewpoint on natural selection in the final part of the eighth chapter of his Origin of Species, where he wrote: ". . . To my imagination it is far more satisfactory to look at such instincts as the young cuckoo ejecting it's foster brothers (from the nest),-ants making slaves-the larvae of ichneumonide feeding with the live bodies of the caterpillars,-not as especially endowed or created instincts, but as one general law leading to the advancement of all organic beings [mankind included],-namely, multiply, vary, let the strongest live and the weakest die." (Origin, final paragraph of Chapter Eight on Instinct, 6th edition)

We find Darwin's outlook on his role as a naturalist and what he thought of the delicate balance of nature when he wrote in 1856, upon beginning his Origin: "What a book a devil's chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering low and horridly cruel works of nature." (25) 

In contrast to Darwin's gray, dreary, brutal vision of the natural world we find Edward Blyth's observations of the cooperation of many species inhabiting a similar ecosystem. A comparison of Darwin's and Blythe's writings will show that Blyth did not see natural selection as having the capacity to originate any species, it could only preserve and protect the integrity of already existing species, thus Blyth was correctly in line with what modern scholarship has to say about it.

Blyth, the man from whom Darwin took his major ideas from  and then turned them around to deny the special, miraculous creation of species by God (William Wells had actually written of natural selection in 1813, but Darwin claimed that he was unfamiliar with Well's writings at the time of the original publication of The Origin of Species.

Later on, after being brought to task by certain individuals for taking credit for an idea that was not his own, Darwin gave Wells credit for the idea; however Wells originated nothing novel either: the basic concept of natural selection had been around since ancient Greek time. It was Blyth who articulated and developed these ideas within a creationist context, and it is Blyth from whom Darwin borrowed heavily from), was also an early ecologist and conservationist, evidently concerned for the welfare of our ecosystem and man's role in preserving it. He expressed these sentiments well over one hundred years before the birth of the modern ecology movement when he wrote of ". . . the system which the existence of one species is necessary to that of another, and which binds each race to it's locality; where the presence of each is alike necessary to preserve the equilibrium of organic being around." (26)

Also in stark contrast to Darwin's view of the "clumsy, wasteful, blundering, low . . . works of nature", Blyth wrote: "How beautifully do we thus perceive, as in a thousand other instances the balance of nature preserved . . ."(27) and then he left us with this stern admonition: "In his vanity (man) is apt to imagine that all were made for him . . . yet how ardently does he labor to exterminate every portion of that creation . . ."(28)

There were four important distinctions that we should look at between Darwin's writings and Edward Blyth's.  

1. First of all, Blyth did not believe in evolution, he did not believe that all life descended from a common ancestor, but he believed in separately created kinds, as spoken of in the book of Genesis from which all variations among species were derived from. He wrote: "What is a species? What constitutes specific distinction? To which the only rational reply appears to be (and even this is quite incapable of probation) beings derived from a separate origin." (29)  

2. Secondly, Blyth also saw (and quite correctly) in natural selection not an originating principle but a conserving factor in operation designed to preserve the integrity of a species: (30) "It is worthy of remark, however that the original and typical form of an animal is in great measure kept up by the same identical means by which a true breed is produced. The original form of a species is unquestionably better adapted to it's natural habits than any modification of that form . . . the latter in a state of nature, is allowed but few opportunities of continuing it's race . . . The same law, therefore, which was intended by Providence to keep up the typical qualities of a species, can be easily converted by man into a means of raising different varieties, but it is also clear that, if man did not keep up these breeds by regulating their sexual intercourse, they would all naturally soon revert to the original type."

Blyth also touched on the subject of comparative anatomy of creatures with outwardly similar morphology (ex. Men and apes): "I must venture, however, to differ from the majority of them [evolutionary minded naturalists] in opposing the prevalent notion, that the extreme modifications of diverse types blend and inosculate by direct affinity [common evolutionary descent]; contending however closely these may apparently resemble, the most similar modifications of diverse types are not, in a physiological sense, more nearly related to each other than are the more characteristic examples of the same." (31) He wrote in another section: ". . . every species is esentially distinct and separate from every other species; otherwise it would not be a species but a variety. The most similar species, therefore, are only allied to each other in consequence of the resemblence of their general organization."" (32)

Thus, men and apes simply resemble each other, that does not in itself prove any type of common descent.

As far as certain DNA similarities, humans have more in common genetically with chickens than we do with rats, a mammal to whom we are supposedly more related to in evolutionary terms. (Humans are genetically more similar to chickens than rats; Wageningen International Studies Paper; Whisp'r Archive, Issue 31 - 26.10.2000 Page 05)

Some marsupials are remarkably similar to certain Eutheriatic (non-pouched) mammals, in fact they resemble some Eutheriatic mammals more than other Eutheriatic mammals resemble each other, however their method of weaning their young clearly sets them apart as another order of living beings entirely. 

3. Thirdly, Blyth clearly saw the wise hand of God involved in natural law: "Then, and with humble reverence, let the mighty acts of Supreme Omnipotence be spoken of, it may be that the eternal and ever glorious Being which willed matter into existence shall pronounce on it the final doom of annihilation . . . Or, what is more probable, to judge from the universal benevolence of all that is within our grasp, it's elements shall again be called forth into light and life, and blaze forth the recommencement of the same system." (33)

4. Fourthly, Blyth saw man as a creation by God distinct and unique from the rest of the animal world and from all creation: "A new era commenced with the introduction of man upon the world; a secondary intelligence was permitted to assume dominion over matter."(34)

He wrote in another treatise:

"The same awful (awesome) Being who first awakened man into existence in common with the meanest atom, who appointed his destiny upon earth to be so diverse from that of his other creatures, who endowed him alone to reflect upon his Makers goodness and power . . ." (35)

These are some of the very important differences between Blyth's majestic vision of God's beautiful creation and of man's role to play in it contrasted with Darwin's evolutionary theories of some furtive creature struggling to survive by eliminating his competitors as they ascend out of primordial slime.

Let us see whether Darwin's ideas of chance evolution or Blyth's ideas of an intelligent designer make more sense in light of some observations of nature. Darwin did say that his theory would be totally discredited if a trait could be shown not to have arisen by gradual evolutionary processes: "If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed, which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down." (36)

The pig shark, so named because it has a nose and mouth section remarkably resembling a pigs, does something quite unique among any creature of the animal Kingdom, there is no evidence of anything like it at all in any other animal, fossilized or modern. It's eggs are shaped like perfectly formed auger-like screws, precision fitted as though from a tool-makers machine shop, and then it drills these egg capsules into rock crevices, where the embryo develops safe and secure from predators for the space of a year!

Nothing like it exists at all in any other species of shark, there is no evidence of evolution having produced this marvel, it speaks for design from a creative intelligence, not blind chance and random chemicals mixing together. (37)

In a comparative study of the hearts of the four types of living reptiles; lizards, snakes, turtles, and crocodiles, we find that there are major structural differences between them all, with no indication of any type of an intermediate form ever existing, in fact, an intermediate form between a crocodile's heart and that of any other reptile would undoubtedly spell instant death to the creature.

In lizards, snakes, and turtles we have the right atrium and the left atrium situated next to each other, on the same side of the heart, to the left of the two aorta, while the pulmonary artery is on the right side of the heart. The crocodile's heart, on the other hand, is not anything like this at all. His right atrium and left atrium are on opposite sides of the heart: the right atrium is placed where the pulmonary artery is in the other reptiles, while the pulmonary artery and two aorta are situated in between the two atria.

Among the three remaining types of reptiles, a lizards heart has both aortas and both atria connected to the left ventricle, while in a turtles heart only the right aorta and the two atria are connected the left ventricle, the left aorta is connected to the right ventricle. In a snakes heart only the left atrium opens into the left ventricle, both of the aortas and the right atrium open into the right ventricle. None of these creatures could have survived unless their hearts were perfectly formed as they are from the beginning of their existence, an intermediate form would spell instant doom for an animal, and yet none of these reptiles have hearts that are alike in the slightest.

The amphibian has a heart unlike that of any reptilian heart. Instead of a four chambered heart like that found in reptiles, with an amphibian's heart there are only two atria that pass into a single ventricle, and a fish only has one atrium and one ventricle connected to the gills. There is definitely a progression in complexity from the heart of the fish to the reptile, but there is nothing like an intermediate stage to be found, an intermediate stage would be fatal for any creature. A heart must be completely functional and fully developed for the creature to survive.

It is similar to having four distinct types of internal combustion engines: a V-6 gasoline engine; a single piston motorcycle engine; an in-line diesel engine; and a rotary engine. Although all of these engines use similar chemical, electrical, and mechanical principles in their operation, they all have quite distinct designs for a particular, unique purpose. None of these engines "evolved" into the other engines, each one would have to be perfectly functional, with the correct specifications, timing, and design features from the start for them to operate.

(Since originally writing this, an evolutionist by the name of Lenny Flank has disputed my claim that there are no transitional forms for the hearts of the four types of reptiles. He brought up the pachyrhachis, a fossilized snake, and a fossil amphibian called acanthostega as some sort of proof for transitional forms. Unfortunately for Flank, it is doubtful that they would provide information on any transitional forms of reptilian hearts since we do not have any remains at all of the hearts of these two extinct species. Furthermore, even if we did, their hearts would in all probability be the same as the hearts of modern snakes and amphibian salamanders; after all the pachyrhachis was simply a snake with unique claspers probably used in mating, and the acanthostega was a salamander, no more, no less.)

There are quite a few different methods of reproduction in the fish world. Some fish mate by coupling with their partners, there are some fish species where the females simply lay their eggs in a certain region while the male swims by and squirts his sperm over the eggs. In some species the male fish have no external sexual organ, in other species the male fish have two, with the female having two corresponding areas on her body for the male to conjoin with, however the seahorse is perhaps the most remarkable innovator in the field of reproduction.

 While male seahorses have no external male sexual organ, the females do, and it corresponds in the mating process in the same manner that a male organ does on other species, except that instead of ejecting sperm, she ejects eggs into the male seahorses sperm pouch, which serves as a womb where the male seahorse carries and nurses the fertilized eggs, much as a female of other species does with her young. The eggs attach themselves to the walls inside of the pouch through which they receive oxygen and nutrients.

 After the eggs have gone through the progressive stages of embryonic development within the pouch, the male gives birth to a hoard of tiny, squiggling seahorses, even going through labor pains during delivery. In other respects, male seahorses exhibit male characteristics, even challenging other seahorses for the females attention in pre-nuptial rituals.

 The seahorse is also the only known fish that mates for life, or until the death of one of the partners. When both partners meet each other after a brief separation, their colors brighten, they engage in greetings, they nuzzle each other, and then they link tails and swim together from one blade of seagrass to another in a beautiful dance. The sea-dragon, similar to the seahorse, engages in the same method of reproduction, except that instead of having a pouch the male sea-dragon carries the eggs under his tail.

 There is no known evolutionary explanation for the development of the seahorse’s unique method of copulation, nothing like it is found in any other species of animal, no hint of “gradual development” of chance favorable modifications.

Ants and aphids get along wonderfully. In fact it might even be safe to say that the aphid is the ants best friend. Ants raise aphids, much as we raise cattle and sheep, herding them and tending to their needs, defending them from predators, even mulching and tending the plant that the aphids live on and providing for their young.

 What do the ants get in return? Honeydew, a tasty delicacy made of plant sap that the aphid ingests and then secretes for the ant to lap up. Recent study has shown that the ants do not need this snack to survive, but that they cultivate it for pleasure! One study has shown that some aphids will not secrete this chemical normally without the ants encouragement, even when stimulated to do so.

 Some ants are ranchers, other ants like to farm. The Acromyrmex octospinosus, leaf cutter ants of Paraguay, grow fungus to feed upon, often harvesting it in huge plantations, even mulching the soil with dead organic matter and using caterpillar waste as manure. They have hanging gardens of the fungus within widened chambers inside of their nests, and obtain all of their dietary nutrition from it. Could such a remarkable condition have come about through blind evolutionary chance?

 Remember “The Wind in the Willows”?  How about “The House at Pooh Corner”? In these enchanting stories from our youth we read of Toad and Frog and other of natures’ denizens commingling happily together in animal society as they faced the trials and triumphs of everyday life.

Pure fantasy? Consider Alpheas, the snapping shrimp and his six-inch long friend with an almost longer Latin name, Cryptocentrus coeruleopunctatus, the goby fish. Alphy and Goby are friends, in fact they are room-mates together, safely tucked away in a snug little burrow that Alphy digs in the sand with his claws. Sometimes Goby takes Alphy for a walk, or Alphy takes Goby for a swim, take your pick. Anyway, when they leave their little burrow and wander around the ocean floor foraging for food, as Alphy skuttles along he stays in physical contact with Goby, who swims just above him, with one of his antenna, which acts as a sort of “leash”. This works out very well, since Alphy is very nearly blind and cannot detect the presence of predators. Not to worry though. When danger approaches, Goby signals Alphy with a wriggle of his body and a swish of his fins, and Alphy then dashes back into the safety and security of their burrow, followed closely by Goby. This is how Goby earns his rent, by assuming the role of “guard fish” for the nearsighted Alphy.

Pretty neat arrangement. Instead of “survival of the fittest” it would seem that “survival of the friendliest” would be a more apt description for this set of affairs. How could evolution account for this?

Darwin even wrote of the previously mentioned process of aphid and ant symbiosis in his Origin, of course not from his own research but from the work of Pierre Huber. He had no good answers as to how this came about through evolutionary means either.

Elsewhere in his Origin he makes mention of the slave making ants, where he again refers to the work of Huber, who found that there is a species of ant that depends entirely on its slaves, to the extent that "without their help, the species would become extinct within a single year."

How such a condition could gradually develop through random, natural selection and evolution is unanswered, and Darwin doesn't even attempt to answer it either. He wrote, "By what steps the instinct of F. sanguines originated I will not pretend to conjecture." Further on in the Origin, Darwin wrote of some bees that do not have the pollen collecting ability to save up food for their young, so they lay their young in the nests of other bees who raise them. Again, he had no idea how this came about through his theory.

When Darwin observed the well developed hierarchy in ant society, he wrote, "The castes, moreover, do not commonly graduate into each other, but are perfectly well defined: being as distinct from each other as are any two species of the same genus, or rather as any two genera of the same family." In other words, he could cite no evidence of gradual modification from one species changing into another. So he could provide no evidence for the evolution of ants­. 

 Even then evolutionary scientists toyed with the "hopeful monster" theory because of the missing transitional forms, which seemed as likely an explanation, in fact infinitely better, than natural selection, and the fossil record bears this out as well, as we shall see., Darwin lamely agrees in the conclusion of his section in the Origin on Objections To My Theory: "To admit all this is, as it seems to me, to enter into the realms of miracle, and to leave those of Science."

 No wonder Professor J.P. Lehman of France wrote: “Darwinism in its ancient and classical form has broken down.'" [i]

 According to Darwin, a morphological (physical) or behavioral trait has to confer some specific advantage for survival to have any value to be passed on to it’s offspring, but this brings up the question of neutral characteristics. Some plants have leaves that are bi-polar, they sprout out on opposites sides of the stem at the same height, while others in the very same ecosystem have leaves that alternate at different levels on each side,  yet both varieties of plants co-exist equally well, neither genetic trait would seem to confer any specific survival advantage. Some traits would seem positively deadly to their owners, yet they are passed on from generation to generation. It would seem that birds that can camouflage themselves from predators would have a selective advantage to others that are conspicuous, yet the female peacock is attracted to the male with the largest, brightest plumage, looking as if he's calling the nearest fox over for dinner.

 In his second work, The Descent of Man, Darwin noted this same fact in his section on Insects, where he stated that a characteristic unfavorable for survival seemed to be the dominant trait:   "From the several foregoing facts it is impossible to admit that the brilliant colours of butterflies, and of some few moths, have commonly been acquired for the sake of protection. We have seen that their colours and elegant patterns are arranged and exhibited as if for display.  Hence I am led to believe that the females prefer or are most excited by the more brilliant males . . . " thus we see that what should be a trait for natural selection to single out and remove from a species according to Darwin’s thesis, by his own admission does not happen in nature. 

 Despite the fact that Darwin was never able to come up with any plausible solution as to the origin of any species, he was absolutely enthralled with the concept of extinction. He wrote: “Hence rare species will be less quickly modified or improved within any given period; they will consequently by beaten in the race for life by the modified and improved descendants of the commoner species.”

 Another selection, among many, illustrates his favorite principle of survival of the fittest: “From these several considerations I think it inevitably follows that as new species in the course of time are formed through natural selection, others will become rarer and rarer, and finally extinct. The forms which stand in closest competition with those undergoing modification and improvement will naturally suffer most. And we have seen in the chapter on the Struggle for existence that it is the most closely-allied forms,-varieties of the same species, and species of the same genus or of related genera,- which, from having nearly the same structure, constitution, and habits, generally come into the severest competition with each other; consequently, each new variety or species, during the progress of its formation, will generally press hardest on its nearest kindred, and tend to exterminate them.” (Origin, pp.52, Benton Pub., 1952)

 It would seem to me, perhaps to any reasonable thinking person, that extinction is just the opposite of the origin of a species. We frequently watch media programs that tell us all about the great extinctions that have taken place throughout ancient history, (although it is more reasonable to relate all or the majority of these extinctions to one actual event, or to a closely related series of events such as a universal tectonic upheaval and flood which were not separated by millions of years in time, they were all world-wide in scope and similar in pattern), thus a documentary on the extinction of the dinosaurs is somehow meant to provide explicit proof that evolution somehow occurred, never mind the fact that the extinction of the dinosaurs throws absolutely no light on their origin.

There are many wonders in nature that speak for intelligent design, not blind, random, haphazard evolutionary processes. The Iracundus signifer, a species of scorpion fish known as the decoy fish, manages to accomplish a feat that is quite remarkable. When food in the form of a smaller fish swims nearby, it lays quite still on the seafloor, even slowing its breathing down and altering its pigment to merge in with the surrounding seascape. This in itself may not seem altogether too remarkable, except that it engages an additional member of its body with an added trick to entice the fish near. It raises its dorsal fin.

What make this particular trick so unique is that its dorsal fin resembles an even smaller fish, even having a black spot between the second and third membranes of the fin that resembles an eye, while a notch between the first and second membranes of the fin resembles a mouth. Thus while it lays quite still on the ocean bottom, blending in with its surroundings, its dorsal fin becomes quite conspicuous, even mimickingthe movements of a fish, and attracting predators, which show up thinking to enjoy a snack, but instead they wind up being swallowed by the decoy fish, making his sudden appearance. Could mindless evolution produce this?the movements of a fish, and attracting predators, which show up thinking to enjoy a snack, but instead they wind up being swallowed by the decoy fish, making his sudden appearance. Could mindless evolution produce this? (38)

Ever had a problem with stomach gas? In mastering the phenomena of flatulence, none can match that remarkable insect, the bombardier beetle. The German chemist Schildknecht studied the amazing defense system of this noxious insect, which makes use of two extremely dangerous gasses that the beetle conjures up within his abdomen, hydroquinine and hydrogen peroxide. This explosive mixture of chemicals would blow the beetle to bits were it not for an added chemical that prevents the reaction from occurrin..

Whenever an enemy in the form of a larger insect or animal shows up to feast on the little critter, he turns his hind quarters towards the predator, squirts both of these chemicals from within a chamber in his hinnquarters, discharging a small explosion when the predator is ready to gulp him down., discharging a small explosion when the predator is ready to gulp him down.

Evolutionary theory would postulate that thousands upon thousands of intermediate forms led up to this novel invention over millions of years, However, even if we assume that the beetle somehow managed to evolve these chemicals at the same time they would still be useless for thousands of generations. As Huse (39) (a creationist scientist) points out, "But what would be the motivation for such a disastrous, trial and error, piecemeal evolution? Everything in evolution is supposed to be beneficial and have a logical purpose, or else it would never develop. But such a process does not make any sense, and to propose that the entire defense system evolved all at once is simply impossible."

Continued in Part 2: Mark Isaak's Evolutionary Tale: