Articles

Moths and Butterflies

By Charles R. Chesnutt

The insect pictured (at the link below) above began life as a caterpillar walking upon numerous legs. It was later transformed into an entirely different insect with the wings of a butterfly. This transformation is called metamorphosis.
How does evolution explain the metamorphosis from a caterpillar to a butterfly?

The advocates of evolution explain this insect and its metamorphosis generally as follows:
"... [the development of] a nymph stage aided their survival [as a caterpillar] and it was added to their life cycle. Eventually at some point a nymph formed a cocoon around itself before maturing to the adult stage. This enabled it to survive a winter and emerge full grown. So, by a long step by step process, the Complete Metamorphosis cycle did arise. This is not absolutely proven." Donning, Daryl P. "Metamorphosis and Evolution." NCSE Reports 14(2) 11. Quoted by Association for Rational Thought.

This explanation and others like it are pure conjecture.

How can random beneficial mutations and survival of the fittest create a creature that, at a predetermined time in its life, is transformed into an entirely different creature? How did environmental pressures create the mechanism for transforming a caterpillar into a butterfly? How? Where is the evidence? Where is a credible, thorough explanation? There is none.
The theory of evolving metamorphosis cannot be tested nor can it be observed nor can it be accounted for or adequately explained in evolutionary terms.

Not does evolution fail to provide any adequate explanation for the metamorphosis of a caterpillar into a butterfly, but it also cannot come near to explaining how either the caterpillar or the butterfly ever came into existence. In this regard, let us consider the photograph above.

Consider that the insect pictured above has a brain. Evolution teaches that the brain of this insect evolved through thousands of years of accidental mutations that somehow benefitted the improved insect and enabled it to survive to the prejudice of other insects who did not enjoy the same beneficial mutations.

Evolutionists have written very little about how the brain in insects evolved. The concept of insects' brains has been relegated to words like "primitive" and "simple:"

Evolution's explanation is brief: the brains of insects like the butterfly and the honeybee are "simple" brains.

The brain of the honeybee is "relatively simple." Evolution Research - General Evolution News, August 5, 2006
The truth is that the brains of these insects are complex beyond comprehension. Other than pure conjecture and generalities, the theory of random beneficial mutations and survival of the fittest makes no attempt whatever to explain how the brain of the butterfly and the brain of the moth could have possibly evolved.

The brains of "simple" insects such as butterflies, bees and flies are probably smaller that the head of a pin yet they compute at the rate of a billion computations in 1/1000 of a second, or a trillion logically organized computations per second. For instance, the brain of the common housefly computes at approximately 1011 computations per second when merely resting:
"Using the criterion of joules per operation, the brain [of the honeybee] is about 7 or 8 orders of magnitude more power efficient than the best of the silicon chips. A direct consequence of their efficiency is that brains can perform many more operations per second than even the newest supercomputers. The fastest digital computers are capable of around 109 computations per second; the brain of the common housefly, for example, performs about 1011 operations per second when merely resting."

Sejnowski, T.J. and Churchland, P.S. The Computational Brain (MIT Press, 1992), p. 9 (emphasis in the original). Sejnowski and Churchland are well recognized in the field of neurobiology and computational neuroscience and are professors at the University of California. See also Sejnowski, T.J. and Churchland, P.S., 1992, Byte Magazine, October, 1992, p. 137 relating to the computing power of the brain of the honeybee. Author's note: a simple internet search provides information relating to Terrence J. Sejnowski and P.S. Churchland.

The evolutionary explanation of how these brains came to be is simple. Accidental incremental changes moved the insect up and up, and with each new computational cycle somehow the insect was better able to survive, until at the end there was a fully integrated living supercomputer the size of a pinhead that would compute at a trillion interrelated and logical cycles each second. And all of these minute electrical computations were supposedly designed by random beneficial mutations that were directed by the survival of the fittest. It is fortunate indeed that these simple brains instantaneously make calculations of speed and distance, wing beat and direction, process in nanoseconds millions upon millions of bits of electrical digital code to create an instantaneous three dimentional representation of external reality (vision), process equally complicated digital codes for smell, for touch, for location, direction and orientation and for memory, and process observations and make instantaneous threat recognition and threat avoidance, and recognize and locate food and reproduce.

It is not rational thought to conclude that unobserved beneficial mutations and survival of the fittest caused caterpillars turn into butterflies and endowed them with brains the size of pinheads that are more powerful than supercomputers.

Scales on the Wings

Somewhere inside the butterfly and moth, there are written instructions that set forth the exact placement of thousands upon thousands of tiny scales on their wings. These scales are individually colored with the obvious intention of forming colored designs. These scales are clearly not random, but were specifically intended to create a pattern and are organized into discrete rows and matching colors.

Here is a close up of the yellow spot that is just under the "li" in the photograph of the insect at the top of this page:
Note how each tiny scale is the same size but colored differently and placed so as to create a design. There is even a discrete fading from brown to yellow. All of the scales are in rows and each one is in its place.

There is an obvious intent to create an overall design of color on the wing.

Where are the accidental scales falling randomly over the surface of the wing? Where are the yellow scales falling into the brown? Evolution's explanation for this is (and has to be) that all of the butterflies with some misplaced scales died because the butterflies with the advantage of properly placed scales were better able to survive. Is this rational thought?

Did the accidental arrangement of thousands (millions?) of scales into this pattern really contribute to the survival of some primordial butterfly? Why are there no butterflies without (lovely) patterns on their wings? Why are they beautiful?
Note also how the scales, like pixels on the computer screen, vary in intensity of color so as to create a picture intended to be seen from a distance. See how the colors form a transition from yellow to dark brown. There is an obvious intent to create not only different colors but also to create a transition between the colors. Note the interspersed blueish scales that create a sheen on the wing without changing the lovely underlying dark brown color.

A Creator designed this butterfly and He intended the colors on its wings to be complimentary brown and yellow and gold and to exhibt accents of yellow that fade into the dark brown background. And He created a bluish sheen that would shimmer in the sunlight.

This pattern and the colors are expressed not only on the wing, but are also written into a language (or code) that is expressed by the arrangement of the atoms of the DNA of this insect. It is this code (this arrangement of atoms and the molecules that the atoms compose) that describes and determines the chemical composition and the size and the color of each of thousands of individual scales.

Somewhere in the molecular structure of this insect there are atoms arranged into a code that defines precisely where each of these scales will be placed in order to form the design. The code specifies the row and the number and where the brown and the yellow and the transition between the yellow and the brown will be placed. This design was intended before the scales were colored, and the code had to be conceived before the atoms and molecules could be arranged in the correct sequence to utilize it.
In order to argue that this insect was not the product of a Creator, evolution must make a presumption. And that presumption is simply that one cannot consider whether or not a Creator created because that consideration is outside of the realm of accepted science. Such a consideration is not science. Since it is not science, it cannot be considered as an answer to a scientific question.

Therefore, accidental mutations and survival of the fittest wrote the design of the butterfly's wings into a code inscribed in a sub-molecular structure inside the cells that make up the insect. The same unobserved process provided the mechanism for the interpretation of that code and then utilized that interpretation to assemble the wings, placed each scale on each row in its place and simultaneously constructed the brain of the insect that operates the wings and computes at the rate of a trillion organized cycles per second.

Since evolution is founded upon the presumption that there is no God, any actual evidence for special creation is quite irrelevant to evolutionists:

Evolutionists don't really care if there is evidence for creationism because their system of belief renders God to be a nullity no matter what the evidence shows. So, to evolutionists, creationism is untenable ab initio no matter what. Evolutionists refer to this as "rational thought." Ironically, this rational thought is nothing more than a theological conclusion. See antiscientific argument.

Environmental pressures have just as much chance of transforming caterpillar into a butterfly as transforming an evolutionist into a Christian - or as much chance of creating a supercomputer the size of a pinhead. God exists and only God can do these things.

http://www.creationdesign.org/english/butterfly.html