Bombardier Beetle 

Yet nature abounds in perfect co ordinations. The insect world has some especially spectacular examples. Brachinus, commonly known as the Bombardier Beetle, squirts a lethal mixture of hydroquinone and hydrogen peroxide into the face of its enemy. These two chemicals, when mixed together, literally explode. So in order to store them inside its body, the Bombardier Beetle has evolved a chemical inhibitor to make them harmless. At the moment the beetle squirts the liquid out of its tail, an anti-inhibitor is added to make the mixture explosive once again. The chain of events that could have led to the evolution of such a complex, coordinated and subtle process is beyond biological explanation on a simple step-by-step basis. The slightest alteration in the chemical balance would result immediately in a race of exploded beetles. 

The problem of evolutionary novelties is quite widely accepted among biologists (panel 12). In every case, the difficulty is compounded by the lack of fossil evidence. The first time the plant, creature, or organ appears, it is in its finished state, so to speak. Among the most intractable examples out of many are the following. 

 

Panel 12

Inexplicable evolutionary novelties 

The problem of creatures, plants, or organs appearing suddenly in the evolutionary record in a completely new form is widely admitted in academic circles. 'The argument still rages,' wrote Stephen Gould in a review of Darwin's own treatment of the subject. Ernst Mayr agreed that biologists occasionally find what appears to be an entirely new structure.., the bird feather, the ear bones of mammals, the swim bladder offish, the wings of insects, and the sting of wasps, ants and bees'.

            Richard B. Goldschmidt, a refugee from Hitler's Germany who spent the remainder of his life as a controversial biologist at Berkeley, UCL, believed strongly that macro-evolution must have happened in mutational leaps, and coined the phrase 'hopeful monster' to describe this." He challenged Darwinians to provide explanations for seventeen features which he claimed could not have evolved on a step-by-step basis. They included:

      Hair in mammals Feathers in birds Segmentation of arthropods and vertebrates Transformation of gill arches Teeth Shells of mollusks Blood circulation Poison apparatus of snakes Whalebone Compound eyes

The challenge was never comprehensively taken up, although as the text in this chapter shows, there are attempted explanations for some of them.

 

Panel 13

How did the whale get its tail?

 One of the principal problems for Darwinians in whale evolution is constructing a pattern of events for the whale's tail to emerge in small, naturally selected steps. The point is that the tail moves up and down, whereas in a land mammal it moves from side to side. This may sound a relatively small difference, but anatomically it is not. It means that somehow the whale's ancestor had to get rid of its pelvis.

Now this cannot be done just because the animal would prefel things this way. However much it wished that it could move its rear quarters up and down more vigorously so that it could swim faster to catch more fish, it could improve only up to a certain point; after this, the further movement.

According to Michael Pitman, a young Cambridge University biologist who has made a study of the problem, 'every downward movement of such a tail would crush the reproductive opening of the creature against the back of the pelvis, causing pain and harm'. Taken to the extreme, there would come a point where the pelvis would be fractured by the action of the tail, thereby making survival impossible. Natural selection would work against, not for, such a change.

So for the up-down action in whales to emerge, there simultaneously had to be random genetic changes that diminished the pelvis while allowing the tail to grow larger. Apart from the stupefyingly long odds against such a chain of events happening by chance, Pitman has concluded that there is a further anatomical objection. At a certain point in the supposed transitionary period, the hip bone would have been 'too small to support the hind legs and yet too large to permit the musculature necessary to move the great tail of the whale'.¹⁸