One of the
most interesting creatures in the mammalian class is without
doubt the flying mammal, the bat.
Bats' sonar system is more sensitive
and efficient than any technological sonar systems so
Topping the list of the characteristics of bats
is the complex "sonar" system they possess. Thanks to this,
bats can fly in the pitch dark, unable to see anything, but
performing the most complicated maneuvers. They can even sense
and catch a caterpillar on the floor of a dark room.
Bat sonar works in the following way. The animal
emits a continuous stream of high-frequency sonic signals,
analyses the echoes from these, and as a result forms a detailed
image of its surroundings. What is more, it manages to do
all of this at an incredible speed, continually and unerringly,
while it is flying through the air.
Research into the bat sonar system has produced
even more surprising results. The range of frequencies the
animal can perceive is very narrow; in other words it can
only hear sounds of certain frequencies, which raises a very
important point. Since sounds which strike a body in motion
change their frequency (the well-known "Doppler effect"),
as a bat sends out signals to a fly, say, that is moving away
from it, the sound waves reflected from the fly should be
at a different frequency that the bat is unable to perceive.
For this reason, the bat should have great difficulty in sensing
But this is not the case. The bat continues to
catch all kinds of small, fast-moving creatures with no difficulty
at all. The reason is that the bat adjusts the frequency of
the sound waves it sends out toward the moving bodies in its
environment as if it knew all about the Doppler effect. For
instance, it emits its highest-frequency signal toward a fly
that is moving away from it, so that when the signal comes
back, its frequency has not dropped below the threshold of
the animal's hearing.
So how does this adjustment take place?
There are two groups of neurons (nerve cells)
in the bat's brain which control the sonar system. One of
these perceives the echoed ultrasound, and the other gives
instructions to the muscles to produce echolocation calls.
These regions in the brain work in tandem, in such a way that
when the frequency of the echo changes, the first region perceives
this, and warns the second one, enabling it to modify the
frequency of the sound emitted in accordance with that of
the echo. As a result, the pitch of the bat's ultrasound changes
according to its surroundings, and sonar system as a whole
is used in the most efficient manner.
The oldest known fossil bat,
found in Wyoming in the United States. 50 million years
old, there is no difference between this fossil and
bats alive today.
It is impossible to be blind to the mortal blow
that the bat sonar system deals to the theory of gradual evolution
through chance mutations. It is an extremely complex structure,
and can in no way be accounted for by chance mutations. In
order for the system to function at all, all of its components
have to work together perfectly as an integrated whole. It
is absurd to believe that such a highly integrated system
can be explained by chance; on the contrary, it actually demonstrates
that the bat is flawlessly created.
In fact, the fossil record also confirms that
bats emerged suddenly and with today's complex structures.
In their book Bats: A Natural History, the evolutionary
paleontologists John E. Hill and James D. Smith reveal this
fact in the form of the following admission:
The fossil record of
bats extends back to the early Eocene ... and has been documented
... on five continents ... [A]ll fossil bats, even the oldest,
are clearly fully developed bats and so they shed little
light on the transition from their terrestrial ancestor.157
And the evolutionary paleontologist L. R. Godfrey
has this to say on the same subject:
There are some remarkably
well preserved early Tertiary fossil bats, such as Icaronycteris
index, but Icaronycteris tells us nothing about the evolution
of flight in bats because it was a perfectly good flying
Evolutionist scientist Jeff Hecht confesses the
same problem in a 1998 New Scientist article:
The origins of bats
have been a puzzle. Even the earliest bat fossils, from
about 50 million years ago, have wings that closely resemble
those of modern bats.159
In short, bats' complex bodily systems cannot
have emerged through evolution, and the fossil record demonstrates
that no such thing happened. On the contrary, the first bats
to have emerged in the world are exactly the same as those
of today. Bats have always existed as bats.
E. Hill, James D Smith, Bats: A Natural History,
British Museum of Natural History, London, 1984, p. 33. (emphasis
158 L. R. Godfrey, "Creationism and Gaps
in the Fossil Record," Scientists Confront Creationism, W.
W. Norton and Company, 1983, p. 199.
159 Jeff Hecht, "Branching Out," New
Scientist, 10 October 1998, vol. 160, no. 2155, p. 14.