Chapter 11

The Amazing Design of Living Things

1, 2. (a) What shows that scientists recognize the need for a designer? (b) Yet how do they then reverse themselves?

WHEN anthropologists dig in the earth and find a triangular piece of sharp flint, they conclude that it must have been designed by someone to be the tip of an arrow. Such things designed for a purpose, scientists agree, could not be products of chance.

² When it comes to living things, however, the same logic is often abandoned. A designer is not considered necessary. But the simplest single-celled organism, or just the DNA of its genetic code, is far more complex than a shaped piece of flint. Yet evolutionists insist that these had no designer but were shaped by a series of chance events.

3. What need did Darwin recognize, and how did he attempt to fill it?

³ However, Darwin recognized the need for some designing force and gave natural selection the job. “Natural selection,” he said, “is daily and hourly scrutinising, throughout the world, the slightest variations; rejecting those that are bad, preserving and adding up all that are good.”⁠¹ That view, however, is now losing favor.

4. How are views on natural selection changing?

⁴ Stephen Gould reports that many contemporary evolutionists now say that substantial change “may not be subject to natural selection and may spread through populations at random.”⁠² Gordon Taylor agrees: “Natural selection explains a small part of what occurs: the bulk remains unexplained.”⁠³ Geologist David Raup says: “A currently important alternative to natural selection has to do with the effects of pure chance.”⁠⁴ But is “pure chance” a designer? Is it capable of producing the complexities that are the fabric of life?

5. What recognition does an evolutionist give to design and to its originator?

⁵ Evolutionist Richard Lewontin admitted that organisms “appear to have been carefully and artfully designed,” so that some scientists viewed them as “the chief evidence of a Supreme Designer.”⁠⁵ It will be useful to consider some of this evidence.

Little Things

6. Are single-celled organisms really simple?

⁶ Let us start with the smallest of living things: single-celled organisms. A biologist said that single-celled animals can “catch food, digest it, get rid of wastes, move around, build houses, engage in sexual activity” and “with no tissues, no organs, no hearts and no minds​—really have everything we’ve got.”⁠⁶

7. How and for what purpose do diatoms make glass, and how important are they to life in the seas?

⁷ Diatoms, one-celled organisms, take silicon and oxygen from seawater and make glass, with which they construct tiny “pillboxes” to contain their green chlorophyll. They are extolled by one scientist for both their importance and their beauty: “These green leaves enclosed in jewel boxes are pastures for nine tenths of the food of everything that lives in the seas.” A large part of their food value is in the oil that diatoms make, which also helps them bob buoyantly near the surface where their chlorophyll can bask in sunlight.

8. With what complex shapes do diatoms cover themselves?

⁸ Their beautiful glass-box coverings, this same scientist tells us, come in a “bewildering variety of shapes​—circles, squares, shields, triangles, ovals, rectangles—​always exquisitely ornamented with geometric etchings. These are filigreed in pure glass with such fine skill that a human hair would have to be sliced lengthwise into four hundred slices to fit between the marks.”⁠⁷

9. How complex are some of the houses radiolarians build?

⁹ One group of ocean-dwelling animals, called radiolarians, make glass and with it build “glass sunbursts, with long thin transparent spikelets radiating from a central crystal sphere.” Or “glass struts are built into hexagons and used to make simple geodesic domes.” Of a certain microscopic builder it is said: “One geodesic dome will not do for this superarchitect; it has to be three lacelike fretted glass domes, one inside another.”⁠⁸ Words fail to describe these marvels of design​—it takes pictures to do so.

10, 11. (a) What are sponges, and what happens to the individual cells when a sponge is completely broken up? (b) What question about sponge skeletons do evolutionists find unanswerable, but what do we know?

¹⁰ Sponges are made up of millions of cells, but only a few different kinds. A college textbook explains: “The cells are not organized into tissues or organs, yet there is a form of recognition among the cells that holds them together and organizes them.”⁠⁹ If a sponge is mashed through a cloth and separated into its millions of cells, those cells will come together and rebuild the sponge. Sponges construct skeletons of glass that are very beautiful. One of the most amazing is Venus’s-flower-basket.

¹¹ Of it, one scientist says: “When you look at a complex sponge skeleton such as that made of silica spicules which is known as [Venus’s-flower-basket], the imagination is baffled. How could quasi-independent microscopic cells collaborate to secrete a million glassy splinters and construct such an intricate and beautiful lattice? We do not know.”⁠¹⁰ But one thing we do know: Chance is not the likely designer.

Partnerships

12. What is symbiosis, and what are some examples?

¹² Many cases exist where two organisms appear designed to live together. Such partnerships are examples of symbiosis (living together). Certain figs and wasps need each other in order to reproduce. Termites eat wood but need the protozoa in their bodies to digest it. Similarly, cattle, goats and camels could not digest the cellulose in grass without the help of bacteria and protozoa living inside them. A report says: “The part of a cow’s stomach where that digestion takes place has a volume of about 100 quarts​—and contains 10 billion microorganisms in each drop.”⁠¹¹ Algae and fungi team up and become lichens. Only then can they grow on bare rock to start turning rock into soil.

13. The partnership between stinging ants and acacia trees raises what questions?

¹³ Stinging ants live in the hollow thorns of acacia trees. They keep leaf-eating insects off the tree and they cut up and kill vines that try to climb on the tree. In return, the tree secretes a sugary fluid that the ants relish, and it also produces small false fruit, which serves as food for the ants. Did the ant first protect the tree and then the tree rewarded it with fruit? Or did the tree make fruit for the ant and the ant then thanked it with protection? Or did it all chance to happen at once?

14. What special provisions and mechanisms do flowers use to attract insects for pollination?

¹⁴ Many cases of such cooperation exist between insects and flowers. Insects pollinate flowers, and in return flowers feed insects pollen and nectar. Some flowers produce two kinds of pollen. One fertilizes seeds, the other is sterile but feeds insect visitors. Many flowers have special markings and smells to guide insects to the nectar. En route the insects pollinate the flower. Some flowers have trigger mechanisms. When insects touch the trigger they get swatted by the pollen-containing anthers.

15. How does the Dutchman’s-pipe ensure cross-pollination, and what questions does this raise?

¹⁵ For example, the Dutchman’s-pipe cannot pollinate itself but needs insects to bring in pollen from another flower. The plant has a tubular leaf that envelops its flower, and this leaf is coated with wax. Insects, attracted by the smell of the flower, land on the leaf and plunge down the slippery slide to a chamber at the bottom. There, ripe stigmas receive the pollen that the insects brought in, and pollination takes place. But for three more days the insects are trapped there by hairs and the waxed sides. After that, the flower’s own pollen ripens and dusts the insects. Only then do the hairs wilt, and the waxed slide bends over until it is level. The insects walk out and, with their new supply of pollen, fly to another Dutchman’s-pipe to pollinate it. The insects do not mind their three-day visit, since they feast on nectar stored there for them. Did all of this happen by chance? Or did it happen by intelligent design?

16. How do some Ophrys orchids and the bucket orchid get themselves pollinated?

¹⁶ Some types of Ophrys orchids have on their petals a picture of a female wasp, complete with eyes, antennae and wings. It even gives off the odor of a female in mating condition! The male comes to mate, but only pollinates the flower. Another orchid, the bucket orchid, has a fermented nectar that makes the bee wobbly on its feet; it slips into a bucket of liquid and the only way out is to wriggle under a rod that dusts the bee with pollen.

Nature’s “Factories”

17. How do leaves and roots work together in nourishing plants?

¹⁷ Green leaves of plants feed the world, directly or indirectly. But they cannot function without the help of tiny roots. Millions of rootlets​—each root tip fitted with a protective cap, each cap lubricated with oil—​push their way through the soil. Root hairs behind the oily cap absorb water and minerals, which travel up minute channels in the sapwood to the leaves. In the leaves sugars and amino acids are made, and these nutrients are sent throughout the tree and into the roots.

18. (a) How does water get from roots to leaves, and what shows that this system is more than adequate? (b) What is transpiration, and how does it contribute to the water cycle?

¹⁸ Certain features of the circulatory system of trees and plants are so amazing that many scientists regard them as almost miraculous. First, how is the water pumped two or three hundred feet above the ground? Root pressure starts it on its way, but in the trunk another mechanism takes over. Water molecules hold together by cohesion. Because of this cohesion, as water evaporates from the leaves the tiny columns of water are pulled up like ropes​—ropes reaching from the roots to the leaves, and traveling at up to 200 feet an hour. This system, it is said, could lift water in a tree about two miles high! As excess water evaporates from the leaves (called transpiration), billions of tons of water are recycled into the air, once again to fall as rain​—a perfectly designed system!

19. What vital service is performed by the partnership of some roots and certain bacteria?

¹⁹ There is more. The leaves need nitrates or nitrites from the ground to make vital amino acids. Some amounts are put into the soil by lightning and by certain free-living bacteria. Nitrogen compounds in adequate quantities are also formed by legumes​—plants such as peas, clover, beans and alfalfa. Certain bacteria enter their roots, the roots provide the bacteria with carbohydrates, and the bacteria change, or fix, nitrogen from the soil into usable nitrates and nitrites, producing some 200 pounds per acre each year.

20. (a) What does photosynthesis do, where does it happen, and who understands the process? (b) How does one biologist view it? (c) What may green plants be called, how do they excel, and what questions are appropriate?

²⁰ There is still more. Green leaves take energy from the sun, carbon dioxide from the air and water from the plant’s roots to make sugar and give off oxygen. The process is called photosynthesis, and it happens in cell bodies called chloroplasts​—so small that 400,000 can fit into the period at the end of this sentence. Scientists do not understand the process fully. “There are about seventy separate chemical reactions involved in photosynthesis,” one biologist said. “It is truly a miraculous event.”⁠¹² Green plants have been called nature’s “factories”​—beautiful, quiet, nonpolluting, producing oxygen, recycling water and feeding the world. Did they just happen by chance? Is that truly believable?

21, 22. (a) What did two famous scientists say in testifying to the intelligence in the natural world? (b) How does the Bible reason on this matter?

²¹ Some of the world’s most famous scientists have found it hard to believe. They see intelligence in the natural world. Nobel-prize-winning physicist Robert A. Millikan, although a believer in evolution, did say at a meeting of the American Physical Society: “There’s a Divinity that shapes our ends . . . A purely materialistic philosophy is to me the height of unintelligence. Wise men in all the ages have always seen enough to at least make them reverent.” In his speech he quoted Albert Einstein’s notable words, wherein Einstein said that he did “try humbly to comprehend even an infinitesimal part of the intelligence manifest in nature.”⁠¹³

²² Evidence of design surrounds us, in endless variety and amazing intricacy, indicating a superior intelligence. This conclusion is also voiced in the Bible, where design is attributed to a Creator whose “invisible qualities are clearly seen from the world’s creation onward, because they are perceived by the things made, even his eternal power and Godship, so that they are inexcusable.”​—Romans 1:20.

23. What reasonable conclusion does the psalmist express?

²³ With so much evidence of design in the life around us, it does seem “inexcusable” to say that undirected chance is behind it. Hence, for the psalmist to credit an intelligent Creator is certainly not unreasonable: “How many your works are, O Jehovah! All of them in wisdom you have made. The earth is full of your productions. As for this sea so great and wide, there there are moving things without number, living creatures, small as well as great.”​—Psalm 104:24, 25.

Chapter 12

Who Did It First?

1. What did a biologist say about human inventors?

“I HAVE the suspicion,” one biologist said, “that we’re not the innovators we think we are; we’re merely the repeaters.”⁠¹ Many times, human inventors only repeat what plants and animals have been doing for thousands of years. This copying from living things is so prevalent that it has been given its own name​—bionics.

2. What comparison did another scientist make between human technology and that of nature?

² Another scientist says that practically all the fundamental areas of human technology “have been opened up and utilized to advantage by living things . . . before the human mind learned to understand and master their functions.” Interestingly, he adds: “In many areas, human technology is still lagging far behind nature.”⁠²

3. What questions should be kept in mind as examples of bionics are considered?

³ As you reflect on these complex abilities of living creatures that human inventors have attempted to copy, does it seem reasonable to believe that they happened by chance alone? And happened, not just once, but many times in unrelated creatures? Are these not the kind of intricate designs that experience teaches can only be the product of a brilliant designer? Do you really think that chance alone could create what it later took gifted men to copy? Bear in mind such questions as you consider the following examples:

4. (a) How do termites cool their homes? (b) What question are scientists unable to answer?

⁴ AIR CONDITIONING. Modern technology cools many homes. But long before, termites also cooled theirs, and they still do. Their nest is in the center of a large mound. From it, warm air rises into a network of air ducts near the surface. There stale air diffuses out the porous sides, and fresh cool air seeps in and descends into an air chamber at the bottom of the mound. From there it circulates into the nest. Some mounds have openings at the bottom where fresh air comes in, and in hot weather, water brought up from underground evaporates, thus cooling the air. How do millions of blind workers coordinate their efforts to build such ingeniously designed structures? Biologist Lewis Thomas answers: “The plain fact that they exhibit something like a collective intelligence is a mystery.”⁠³

5-8. What have airplane designers learned from wings of birds?

⁵ AIRPLANES. The design of airplane wings has benefited over the years from the study of the wings of birds. The curvature of the bird’s wing gives the lift needed to overcome the downward pull of gravity. But when the wing is tilted up too much, there is the danger of stalling. To avoid a stall, the bird has on the leading edges of its wings rows, or flaps, of feathers that pop up as wing tilt increases (1, 2). These flaps maintain lift by keeping the main airstream from separating from the wing surface.

⁶ Still another feature for controlling turbulence and preventing “stalling out” is the alula (3), a small bunch of feathers that the bird can raise up like a thumb.

⁷ At the tips of the wings of both birds and airplanes, eddies form and they produce drag. Birds minimize this in two ways. Some, like swifts and albatross, have long, slender wings with small tips, and this design eliminates most of the eddies. Others, like big hawks and vultures, have broad wings that would make big eddies, but this is avoided when the birds spread out, like fingers, the pinions at the ends of their wings. This changes these blunt ends into several narrow tips that reduce eddies and drag (4).

⁸ Airplane designers have adopted many of these features. The curvature of wings gives lift. Various flaps and projections serve to control airflow or to act as braking devices. Some small planes lessen wing-tip drag by the mounting of flat plates at right angles to the wing surface. Airplane wings, however, still fall short of the engineering marvels found in the wings of birds.

9. What animals and plants preceded man in the use of antifreeze, and how effective is it?

⁹ ANTIFREEZE. Humans use glycol in car radiators as antifreeze. But certain microscopic plants use chemically similar glycerol to keep from freezing in Antarctic lakes. It is also found in insects that survive in temperatures of 4 degrees below zero Fahrenheit. There are fish that produce their own antifreeze, enabling them to live in the frigid waters of Antarctica. Some trees survive temperatures of 40 degrees below zero Fahrenheit because they contain “very pure water, without dust or dirt particles upon which ice crystals can form.”⁠⁴

10. How do certain water beetles make and use underwater breathing devices?

¹⁰ UNDERWATER BREATHING. People strap tanks of air to their backs and remain under water for up to an hour. Certain water beetles do it more simply and stay under longer. They grab a bubble of air and submerge. The bubble serves as a lung. It takes carbon dioxide from the beetle and diffuses it into the water, and takes oxygen dissolved in the water for the beetle to use.

11. How extensive are biological clocks in nature, and what are some examples?

¹¹ CLOCKS. Long before people used sundials, clocks in living organisms were keeping accurate time. When the tide is out microscopic plants called diatoms come to the surface of wet beach sand. When the tide comes in the diatoms go down into the sand again. Yet in sand in the laboratory, without any tidal ebb and flow, their clocks still make them come up and go down in time with the tides. Fiddler crabs turn a darker color and come out during low tide, turn pale and retreat to their burrows during high tide. In the laboratory away from the ocean, they still keep time with the changing tide, turning dark and light as the tide ebbs and flows. Birds can navigate by sun and stars, which change position as time passes. They must have internal clocks to compensate for these changes. (Jeremiah 8:7) From microscopic plants to people, millions of internal clocks are ticking away.

12. When did men start using crude compasses, but how were they in use long before this?

¹² COMPASSES. About the 13th century C.E. men began to use a magnetic needle floating in a bowl of water​—a crude compass. But it was nothing new. Bacteria contain strings of magnetite particles just the right size to make a compass. These guide them to their preferred environments. Magnetite has been found in many other organisms ​—birds, bees, butterflies, dolphins, mollusks and others. Experiments indicate that homing pigeons can return home by sensing the earth’s magnetic field. It is now generally accepted that one of the ways migrating birds find their way is by the magnetic compasses in their heads.

13. (a) How are mangroves able to live in salt water? (b) What animals can drink seawater, and how so?

¹³ DESALINATION. Men build huge factories to remove salt from seawater. Mangrove trees have roots that suck up seawater, but filter it through membranes that remove the salt. One species of mangrove, Avicennia, using glands on the underside of its leaves, gets rid of the excess salt. Sea birds, such as gulls, pelicans, cormorants, albatross and petrels, drink seawater and by means of glands in their heads remove the excess salt that gets into their blood. Also penguins, sea turtles and sea iguanas drink salt water, removing the excess salt.

14. What are some examples of creatures that generate electricity?

¹⁴ ELECTRICITY. Some 500 varieties of electric fish have batteries. The African catfish can produce 350 volts. The giant electric ray of the North Atlantic puts out 50-ampere pulses of 60 volts. Shocks from the South American electric eel have been measured as high as 886 volts. “Eleven different families of fishes are known to include species with electrical organs,” a chemist says.⁠⁵

15. Animals conduct what various farming activities?

¹⁵ FARMING. For ages men have tilled the soil and tended livestock. But long before that, leaf-cutting ants were gardeners. For food they grew fungi in a compost they had made from leaves and their droppings. Some ants keep aphids as livestock, milk sugary honeydew from them and even build barns to shelter them. Harvester ants store seeds in underground granaries. (Proverbs 6:6-8) A beetle prunes mimosa trees. Pikas and marmots cut, cure and store hay.

16. (a) How do sea turtles, some birds and alligators incubate their eggs? (b) Why is the male mallee bird’s job a most challenging one, and how does he do it?

¹⁶ INCUBATORS. Man makes incubators to hatch eggs, but in this he is a latecomer. Sea turtles and some birds lay their eggs in the warm sand for incubation. Other birds will lay their eggs in the warm ashes of volcanoes for hatching. Sometimes alligators will cover their eggs with decaying vegetable matter to produce heat. But in this the male mallee bird is the expert. He digs a big hole, fills it with vegetable matter and covers it with sand. The fermenting vegetation heats the mound, the female mallee bird lays an egg in it weekly for up to six months, and all that time the male checks the temperature by sticking his beak into the mound. By adding or removing sand, even in weather from below freezing to very hot, he keeps his incubator at 92 degrees Fahrenheit.

17. How do the octopus and the squid use jet propulsion, and what unrelated animals also use it?

¹⁷ JET PROPULSION. Today when you fly in a plane you are probably being jet-propelled. Many animals are also jet-propelled and have been for millenniums. Both the octopus and the squid excel in this. They suck water into a special chamber and then, with powerful muscles, expel it, shooting themselves forward. Also using jet propulsion: the chambered nautilus, scallops, jellyfish, dragonfly larvae and even some oceanic plankton.

18. What are some of the many plants and animals that have lights, and in what way are their lights more efficient than man’s?

¹⁸ LIGHTING. Thomas Edison is credited with inventing the light bulb. But it is not too efficient, as it loses energy in the form of heat. Fireflies do better as they flash their lights on and off. They produce cold light that loses no energy. Many sponges, fungi, bacteria and worms glow brightly. One, called the railroad worm, is like a miniature train moving along with its red “headlight” and 11 white or pale green pairs of “windows.” Many fish have lights: flashlight fish, anglerfish, lantern fish, viperfish and constellation fish, to name a few. Microorganisms in the ocean surf light up and sparkle by the millions.

19. Who made paper long before man, and how does one papermaker insulate its home?

¹⁹ PAPER. Egyptians made it thousands of years ago. Even so, they were far behind wasps, yellow jackets and hornets. These winged workers chew up weathered wood, producing a gray paper to make their nests. Hornets hang their large round nests from a tree. The outer covering is many layers of tough paper, separated by dead-air spaces. This insulates the nest from heat and cold as effectively as would a brick wall 16 inches thick.

20. How does one type of bacterium move about, and how have scientists reacted to this?

²⁰ ROTARY ENGINE. Microscopic bacteria preceded man by thousands of years in making a rotary engine. One bacterium has hairlike extensions twisted together to form a stiff spiral, like a corkscrew. It spins this corkscrew around like the propeller of a ship and drives itself forward. It can even reverse its engine! But how it works is not completely understood. One report claims that the bacterium can attain speeds equivalent to 30 miles an hour, and it says that “nature had, in effect, invented the wheel.”⁠⁶ A researcher concludes: “One of the most fantastic concepts in biology has come true: Nature has indeed produced a rotary engine, complete with coupling, rotating axle, bearings, and rotating power transmission.”⁠⁷

21. How do several animals, completely unrelated, use sonar?

²¹ SONAR. The sonar of bats and dolphins surpasses man’s copy of it. In a darkened room with fine wires strung across it, bats fly about and never touch the wires. Their supersonic sound signals bounce off these objects and return to the bats, who then make use of echolocation to avoid them. Porpoises and whales do the same thing in water. Oilbirds use echolocation as they enter and leave the dark caves they roost in, making sharp clicking sounds to guide them.

22. How does the principle of ballast that is used in submarines work in several different, unrelated animals?

²² SUBMARINES. Many submarines existed before men invented them. Microscopic radiolarians have oil droplets in their protoplasm by which they regulate their weight and thereby move up or down in the ocean. Fish diffuse gas in to or out of their swim bladders, altering their buoyancy. Inside its shell, the chambered nautilus has chambers or flotation tanks. By altering the proportions of water and gas in these tanks, it regulates its depth. The cuttlebone (the calcified internal shell) of the cuttlefish is filled with cavities. To control buoyancy, this octopuslike creature pumps water out of its skeleton and allows gas to fill the emptied cavity. Thus the cavities of the cuttlebone function just like water tanks in a submarine.

23. What animals use heat-sensing organs, and how accurate are they?

²³ THERMOMETERS. From the 17th century onward men have developed thermometers, but they are crude compared to some found in nature. A mosquito’s antennae can sense a change of 1/300 degree Fahrenheit. A rattlesnake has pits on the sides of its head with which it can sense a change of 1/600 degree Fahrenheit. A boa constrictor responds in 35 milliseconds to a heat change of a fraction of a degree. The beaks of the mallee bird and the brush turkey can tell temperature to within one degree Fahrenheit.

24. What expression do these examples remind us of?

²⁴ All this copying from animals by humans is reminiscent of what the Bible suggests: “Ask the very beasts, and they will teach you; ask the wild birds​—they will tell you; crawling creatures will instruct you, fish in the sea will inform you.”​—Job 12:7, 8, Moffatt.