May 18, 2007 | David F. Coppedge

Batting for Stupid Evolution Quote of the Week

National Geographic reported that bats are master flyers, whose aerodynamic skills outperform birds.1  They also have an exquisitely refined sonar sense that allows them to discern detail as fine as a fish fin sticking out of the water.  Coupled with aerobatics and see-in-the-dark sonar, a bat can swoop down and catch the fish right out of the water.
    There is a feature story in the June National Geographic Magazine on the bats of Panama.  It shows photographs of bats that can fish, catch insects, and feed on fruit.  The first fossil bat was already capable of powered flight (04/20/2006, bullet 2).  There is no evidence, fossil or genetic, for how they arose from a non-flying mammal (01/28/2005).  This did not stop Jennifer Holland from inventing an evolutionary story out of thin air:

Sixty million years ago, on a planet crawling with mammals, one tree dweller rose above the crowd on paper thin wings.  So goes the story of ancestral bats, which, equipped with flight and a sixth sense called echolocation, mastered the night sky and flourished.

(NG June 2007, p. 142).  Holland did not mention who the ancestral bats were, or what evidence she had for their existence.  Her tale sounds like an instantaneous evolution of multiple, complete, complex, interacting systems.  It also avoids explaining how this “one tree dweller,” so well-equipped with new equipment, could have mated and produced fertile offspring.


1See technical paper about bat aerodynamics in Science, May 11, 2007.

Some day we are going to have a good laugh at the Darwinians.  We’re going to collect these kinds of statements and put them with cartoons.  Maybe we could call it the Real Darwin Awards.  Now, if they would just eliminate themselves from the gene pool…

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Categories: Dumb Ideas, Mammals

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