Creation Spotlight
Bombardier Beetle - God's Chemical Warriors
One of the most fascinating creatures in nature is
the bombardier beetle. Only about an inch long, it
has the ability to defend itself by spraying a super hot
stinky chemical mixture into the face of a potential
attacker. What is amazing about this ability is the
sheer complexity of the biological machinery needed to
make it happen.
The bombardier beetle has two chambers that hold the
chemicals hydroquinones and hydrogen peroxide. When a
beetle feels threatened the chemicals are pumped into
a reservoir where catalases and peroxidases are mixed in.
As these chemicals mix in the reservoir, oxygen is
released and the mixture generates enough heat to
bring it to the boiling point and vaporize some of it. This
super hot mixture is then expelled explosively
through openings in the beetle's abdomen.
What happens inside the bombardier beetle is what is known as a binary
chemical reaction. This simply means that separately
the chemicals are harmless, but when mixed together
they form a dangerous chemical compound. Human chemists only came
up with this process as a weapon a few years ago; God
created it a long time ago.
In an article Bombardier Beetles and the Argument of Design by
evolutionist Mark Isaak, Isaak argues that the
features of the beetle could have evolved slowly by
random chance. He lists a 15-step scenario of changes he says could
have happened to produce the complex biological
machinery of the beetle. What is most interesting
about his 15-page article is that he never explains how
the increased information necessary for the changes
to happen could have happened in a completely
unplanned manner, but in such a way as to perfectly
balance the chemicals and forces involved. The
argument for design is simply this, the complex
information necessary to bring about the design and order we see
in Creation cannot simply arise by itself. Just as a
book cannot write itself, it must come from a higher
source, the author, so too the information that is in
the many complex biological organisms in nature cannot create
themselves, they must come from a higher source, God.
Evolutionists routinely claim that if they can invent a story
that sounds plausible to them, and they have very low
standards of plausibility, they have then solved the
problem of how an organism or organ would have
evolved. But storytelling is not science. Mutations
are the only thing that evolutionists can point to as
engines of real change. What evolutionists never explain
is how mutations, which can only rearrange or degrade
genetic information, can bring about an increase in
information, the kind of increase in information that
would be absolutely necessary for new organisms to evolve.
What we see in the bombardier beetle is clear evidence of God's design in His Creation.
