Articles

Bugging TBEs (Evolutionism is Full of Bugs)

By Karl C. Priest April 1, 2017 (No fooling!)

I bug True Believers in Evolutionism (TBE) around the Internet.  I like to ask them to post their very best proof of evolution. Keep in mind that I am, and want to remain, a layman and not attempt to argue as a scientist/entomologist.

When they post something about the fossil record I counter with the point that the fossil record indicates very little, if any, differences from living creatures. I say something like “ants, butterflies, and cockroaches were are and always will be ants, butterflies, and cockroaches.  They simply have a designed capability for variation with limitations.”

TBEs commonly viciously attac me after I comment on an Internet article. This article focuses on one such incident. I will omit the TBE’s childish (and often profane/obscene) slurs and point out his arguments. Some slight editing has been done for clarity or typo correction.

The TBE claimed that insects have evolved based upon an article “The Evolution of Insects” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_of_insects).  I replied, “The genome sequencing is about as valuable as comparing the chemical composition of a bicycle and a jet.  And, lining up insects to form a hierarchy is like a model I made showing the evolution of a hinge.”

I went on to point out (from his Wikipedia link), “I f the Rhyniognatha was not a type of springtail, it was simply an insect that is now extinct. Springtails (next in your imagined hierarchy) ARE, ALWAYS have been and ALWAYS will be springtails!!!” 

The TBE said cockroaches have lost their ovipositor over time.  I responded, “Your information on an ‘internal ovipositor’ is useless. Even if it was a species of roach that had a designed reproductive capability, it does not come close to proving it is in a line of descent to the AMAZING roaches scurrying around today. The fossil of this imagined 300 million year old roach (http://www.livescience.com/8203-ancient-cockroach-relative-revealed-3.html)  shows an ASTOUNDING complicated creature. You should study roach reproduction and try to explain the multitude of miracles that would cause it (forget even originating life from non-life) to evolve. Just try to list the steps!”

“There are over 3000 species of roaches extant today—but they ARE roaches! Just because a Ford and a Fiat have differently designed internal engine components does not mean that one evolved from the other. And a roach is much more complex than either vehicle.”

I missed that even his original Wikipedia link states, "These were not true cockroaches, as they had an ovipositor, although through the Carboniferous, the ovipositor started to diminish."  Had I noticed that, besides pointing out the MAJOR admission that the creature was not a roach, I would have also pointed out that loss of a feature is devolution.

Since the debate I found another article claiming the insect family tree has been mapped. The brief video with the article points out that there were a HUGE amount of possibilities and the researchers used a lot of speculation on where they placed induvial insects. This seems to be supported by the article “When Did Insects Evolve?” (https://www.wired.com/2014/11/when-did-insects-evolve/)

Also, I took notice of these phrases (bold font added) from the article (in the context of scientific uncertainty):

>Among the stories that can be told
>Fossil evidence suggests
>the researchers' phylogenetic data indicates
>hexapoda, may have evolved even earlier
>the data also suggest
>The timeline established by the researchers indicates that insects likely started colonizing the planet at around the same time as plants

Story telling (a la Kipling’s “Just So Stories” is what evolutionism is all about. “ Kipling entertained his own children and those of his friends by inventing ingenious explanations of such questions as ‘How the Camel Got His Hump’ and ‘How the Leopard Got his Spots’.” (http://www.bl.uk/onlinegallery/onlineex/englit/kipling/)

TBE’s, unless they drop all semblance of honesty, are forced to use equivocal (weasel) words words) like “suggest” and “indicate” along with phrases such as “may have.” “Indicate” means “to point out or point to.” It could easily point to other possibilities. “Suggest” means to “imply as a possibility.” Also, there are other likely suggestions for what was observed. “May have” is no more meaningful than “may not have.” “Likely” is stronger, meaning “having a high probability of occurring or being true.” Evolutionists resist admitting, what middle school children can grasp, the extremely low probability of evolution occurring. In this context, it is biblically true that insects “ started colonizing the planet at around the same time as plants.”

There are two major points in the article:

>If you had a time machine and you went back to the Jurassic, we entomologists would recognize all of the insects and we could [classify] them into their proper order.

>The same fly you might swat today is not much different (if it's different at all) from the fly a caveman might have swatted away 200,000 years ago.

Those points clearly support what I said above about ants, butterflies, and cockroaches.

The TBE attacked me for using the term “kinds” and challenged me to list the kinds of insects. I answered, “Describing the kinds of insects is part of on-going research by scientists. I think it would be on the level of order (and maybe family) using the taxonomic system originated by the creationist Linnaeus.”

Later I asked experts about the accuracy of my response regarding “kinds”.

One replied: (T)he research on insect baraminology isn't really there.  But, based on other baraminological research on vertebrate taxa, and knowing a little about the insects, it seems reasonable that the kind is around the family.  It could also be higher, like the order, or lower like the genus, depending on the insects we are talking about.

Another replied: Even evolutionary entomologists struggle to classify insects (and associated creatures, such as spiders). It is usually fairly disingenuous (and kind of ignorant) for evolutionists to chide creationists over the inability of determining original created kinds when they struggle greatly to even classify contemporary organisms.  It is just simply not an easy thing to do, and often has lots of exceptions and blurred areas of definitions.

Evolutionists support the second comment. From the aforementioned article “When Did Insects Evolve?” :

With over a million described species (of insects), it’s not hard to see how someone might spend an entire life trying to make order out of biodiversity chaos. Taxonomy has a  history of conflict and eccentricity, and the entry of new molecular technologies into the world of tiny pins and museum specimens hasn’t always been smooth … The Insect tree of life has been pruned and re-arranged constantly in the last century. It sometimes feels like taxonomists have been participating in an FBI witness-protection program, the names have been changed so often.
(https://www.wired.com/2014/11/when-did-insects-evolve/)

Back to the TBE’s Wikipedia article. In the spirit of “Helping Evolutionists Get It Right” I will black bold face some of the TBE claims and red bold face my responses.

It seems that orders with aquatic nymphs or larvae become evolutionarily conservative once they had adapted to water. “It seems” is more speculative than scientific. It is pure equivocation. How did they adapt? It would involve hundreds, if not thousands of steps. Adaptation is TBE code for “design”.

When the early (male) insects laid their spermatophores on the ground, it seems likely that some of them used the clasping organs at the end of their body to drag the female over the package. Ditto the previous on equivocation.

Insects evolved from a group of crustaceans. Just saying it does not make it so.

The ancestors of Odonata evolved the habit of grabbing the female behind her head, as they still do today. That is so silly it deserves placement in the “BWAH HAH HAH HAAAA!” article. Insect reproduction is astoundingly complicated!

When the first forests arose on Earth, new niches for terrestrial animals were created. Spore-feeders and others who depended on plants and/or the animals living around them would have to adapt too to make use of them. In a world with no flying animals, it would probably just be a matter of time before some arthropods who were living in the trees evolved paired structures with muscle attachments from their exoskeleton and used them for gliding, one pair on each segment. Further evolution in this direction would give bigger gliding structures on their thorax and gradually smaller ones on their abdomen. Their bodies would have become stiffer while thysanurans, which didn't evolve flight, kept their flexible abdomen. Ditto the previous on equivocation and just saying it does not make it so.

Mayfly nymphs must have adapted to water while they still had the "gliders" on their abdomen intact. So far there is no concrete evidence to support this theory either, but it is one that offers an explanation for the problems of why presumably aquatic animals evolved in the direction they did. “Must have” is another equivocation. and “ offers an explanation” is a great example of elements of “Just So Stories”.

Leaping and arboreal insects seems like a good explanation for this evolutionary process for several reasons. Because early winged insects were lacking the sophisticated wing folding mechanism of neopterous insects, they must have lived in the open and not been able to hide or search for food under leaves, in cracks, under rocks and other such confined spaces. In these old forests there weren't many open places where insects with huge structures on their back could have lived without experiencing huge disadvantages. If insects got their wings on land and not in water, which clearly seems to be the case, the tree canopies would be the most obvious place where such gliding structures could have emerged, in a time when the air was a new territory. Ditto the previous on equivocation (and future example do not need to be repeated). Add “if” which means “uncertain as an indication or sign.”

Insects that had evolved their proto-wings in a world without flying predators could afford to be exposed openly without risk, but this changed when carnivorous flying insects evolved. It is unknown when they first evolved, but once these predators had emerged they put a strong selection pressure on their victims and themselves. Those of the prey who came up with a good solution about how to fold their wings over their backs in a way that made it possible for them to live in narrow spaces would not only be able to hide from flying predators (and terrestrial predators if they were on the ground) but also to exploit a wide variety of niches that were closed to those who couldn't fold their wings in this way. And today the neopterous insects (those that can fold their wings back over the abdomen) are by far the most dominant group of insects. Ditto the previous on “just saying it” (future example do not need to be repeated) and include this in the “BWAH HAH HAH HAAAA!” article.

The water-skimming theory suggests that skimming on the water surface is the origin of insect flight. This theory is based on the fact that the first fossil insects, the Devonian Rhyniognatha hirsti, is thought to have possessed wings, even though the insects' closest evolutionary ties are with crustaceans, which are aquatic. "Suggestion science" and imaginative thoughts are all TBEs have. Calling Kipling! Calling Kipling!

As we know, in mayflies the nymphs and the adults are specialized for two different ways of living; in the water and in the air. The only stage (instar) between these two is the subimago. In more primitive fossil forms, the preadult individuals had not just one instar but numerous ones (while the modern subimago do not eat, older and more primitive species with a subimagos were probably feeding in this phase of life too as the lines between the instars were much more diffuse and gradual than today). Adult form was reached several moults before maturity. They probably didn't have more instars after becoming fully mature. This way of maturing is how Apterygota do it, which moult even when mature, but not winged insects. The specialization of both mayfly stages is complicated almost beyond comprehension and the process of insect molting/metamorphosis is staggeringly complicated, but TBEs have a Just So story to try to explain this miracle.

Modern mayflies have eliminated all the instars between imago and nymph, except the single instar called subimago, which is still not (at least not in the males) fully sexually mature. The other flying insects with incomplete metamorphosis (Exopterygota) have gone a little further and completed the trend; here all the immature structures of the animal from the last nymphal stage are completed at once in a single final moult. The more advanced insects with larvae and complete metamorphosis (Endopterygota) have gone even further. An interesting theory here is that the pupal stage is actually a strongly modified and extended stage of subimago, but so far it is nothing more than a theory. Interestingly enough there are some insects within the Exopterygota, thrips and whiteflies (Aleyrodidae), who have evolved pupae-like stages too. ROTFL!!! The TBEs talk as if the insects had the minds and wills to do those things.

The common denominator among most deposits of fossil insects and terrestrial plants is the lake environment. Those insects that became preserved were either living in the fossil lake (autochthonous) or carried into it from surrounding habitats by winds, stream currents, or their own flight (allochthonous). Drowning and dying insects not eaten by fish and other predators settle to the bottom, where they may be preserved in the lake’s sediments, called lacustrine, under appropriate conditions. That would mainly be attributed to a worldwide flood. Also, it is a STRETCH that a dead insect actually sinks to the bottom of a body of water and becomes fossilized. Try it for yourself.

Insect evolution is characterized by rapid adaptationwith selective pressures exerted by environment, with rapid adaptation being furthered by their high fecundity. It appears that rapid radiations and the appearance of new species, a process that continues to this day, result in insects filling all available environmental niches. “Rapid adaptation” and “selective pressure” is TBE terminology for “well-designed”. Living things can only adapt within strict limitations.

The oldest definitive insect fossil is the Devonian Rhyniognatha hirsti, estimated at 407 to 396 million years ago. This species already possessed dicondylic mandibles, a feature associated with winged insects, suggestingthat wings may already have evolved at this time. Thus, the first insects probably appeared earlier, in the Silurian period. Insects were here from the first week of creation and during the worldwide flood some of them would have been buried in each mud layer. Even if that was (and it wasn’t) millions of years ago, the Rhyniognatha hirstiwas an amazingly COMPLICATED creature.

Modern Archaeognatha and Thysanura still have rudimentary appendages on their abdomen called styli, while more primitive and extinct insects known as Monura had much more developed abdominal appendages. That is called “devolution” and fits very well with the biblical “curse”.

If the ancestors of the other flying insects evolved the same habit of clasping the female and dragging her over their spermathophore, but posterior instead of anterior like the Odonata does, their genitals would come very close to each other. And from there on, it would be a very short step to modify the vestigial appendages near the male genital opening to transfer the sperm directly into the female. The same appendages the male Odonata use to transfer their sperm to their secondary sexual organs at the front of their abdomen. “If” is a big word. Who is going to do the modification? Insect sex is far too complicated to have happened by any process of evolution. If each of the many precise requires are not in place there would not be any offspring a specific species.

One should expect that a gill breathing arthropod would modify its gills to breathe air if it were adapting to terrestrial environments, and not evolve new respiration organs from bottom up next to the original and still functioning ones. Then comes the fact that insect (larva and nymph) gills are actually a part of a modified, closed trachea system specially adapted for water, called tracheal gills. The arthropod trachea can only arise in an atmosphere and as a consequence of the adaptations of living on land. This too indicatesthat insects are descended from a terrestrial ancestor. See the previous comments on “adaptations” and “modifications”. The science of insect respiration is mind boggling.

The origins of insect flight remain obscure, since the earliest winged insects currently known appear to have been capable fliers. Insect flight is, to put it mildly, FANTASTIC.

The wings themselves are sometimes said to be highly modified (tracheal) gills. And there is no doubt that the tracheal gills of the mayfly nymph in many species look like wings. By comparing a well-developed pair of gill blades in the naiads and a reduced pair of hind wings on the adults, it is not hard to imagine that the mayfly gills (tergaliae) and insect wings have a common origin, and newer research also supports this. The tergaliae are not found in any other order of insects, and they have evolved in different directions with time. In some nymphs/naiads the most anterior pair has become sclerotized and works as a gill cover for the rest of the gills. Others can form a large sucker, be used for swimming or modified into other shapes. But it doesn't have to mean that these structures were originally gills. It could also mean that the tergaliae evolved from the same structures which gave rise to the wings, and that flying insects evolved from a wingless terrestrial species with pairs of plates on its body segments: three on the thorax and nine on the abdomen (mayfly nymphs with nine pairs of tergaliae on the abdomen exist, but so far no living or extinct insects with plates on the last two segments have been found). If these were primary gills, it would be a mystery why they should have waited so long to be modified when we see the different modifications in modern mayfly nymphs. Bingo! TBEs have to imagine with their vivid imaginations!

So proto-insects had to specialize and focus their whole existence on improving a single lifestyle in a particular niche. The older the species and the single individuals became, the more would they differ from their original form as they adapted to their new lifestyles better than the generations before. The final body-structure was no longer achieved while still inside the egg, but continued to develop for most of a lifetime, causing a bigger difference between the youngest and oldest individuals. Assuming that mature individuals most likely mastered their new element better than did the nymphs who had the same lifestyle, it would appear to be an advantage if the immature members of the species reached adult shape and form as soon as possible. This may explain why they evolved fewer but more intense instars and a stronger focus on the adult body, and with greater differences between the adults and the first instars, instead of just gradually growing bigger as earlier generations had done. This evolutionary trend explains how they went from ametabolous to hemimetabolous insects. More weasel words from fanatic True Believers in Evolutionism.

Reaching maturity and a fully-grown body became only a part of the development process; gradually a new anatomy and new abilities - only possible in the later stages of life - emerged. The anatomy insects were born and grew up with had limitations which the adults who had learned to fly didn't have. If they couldn't live their early life the way adults did, immature individuals had to adapt to the best way of living and surviving despite their limitations till the moment came when they could leave them behind. This would be a starting point in the evolution where imago and nymphs started to live in different niches, some more clearly defined than others. Also, a final anatomy, size and maturity reached at once with a single final nymphal stage meant less waste of time and energy, and also made a more complex adult body structure. These strategies obviously became very successful with time. Hocus-pocus and we have “a new anatomy and new abilities”! Picture those ancient insects sitting in class as they “learned to fly”!

So, you see, unless you are willingly blind, it is easy to bug True Believers in Evolutionism because evolution is full of bugs. All TBEs are bluffers and a mix of story-tellers and liars.

-----------------------------------

Also see:

BWAH HAH HAH HAAAA!

Evolution is a Lie

If it Wasn't so Funny I'd Cry

WHICH CAME FIRST?

IMPROBABILITY OF EVOLUTION