Insects in Darwin's Ointment, by Frank Sherwin

Crickets have always been crickets.

Arthropods, like all other creatures, validate the creation model by appearing suddenly and completely in the fossil record in a most un-Darwinian manner.¹ A recent discovery of a fossil in Brazil has frustrated evolutionists by being a 100-percent cricket that “has undergone very little evolutionary change since the Early Cretaceous Period.”² Evolution means change, but “100 million years” of stasis hardly validates evolutionary theory.

The phylum Arthropoda is composed of creatures that have paired, jointed appendages and a chitinous (nitrogen-containing polysaccharide) exoskeleton. It is the largest group of animals in God’s creation and includes the crustaceans (lobsters, crabs) and insects. This fossil shows that crickets have always been crickets.

600 generations of fruit flies show not the slightest signs of evolution.

A laboratory insect used for over a century by geneticists is the fruit fly.³ In 2010, researchers reported in the evolutionary journal Nature the results of 600 generations of artificial selection on this creature.⁴ They were hoping to document beneficial mutations becoming fixed in the fruit fly population. But intelligent agents with plenty of research money and time, working under conditions that would evidently favor upward, onward evolution, could not document beneficial mutations. In fact, the opposite occurred with the flies undergoing “reverse evolution”! In addition, the mystical process of natural selection was conspicuously absent.

Pesticide resistant bed bugs are still bed bugs.

Do bed bug survival tactics show that they evolved from an entirely different creature, or are bed bugs just adapting? The latter is a more scientific interpretation, considering they are still the same species of ectoparasite. In Evolution Under the Microscope, David Swift ably discusses an insect’s ability to develop resistance to pesticides⁵—an ability that has nothing to do with Darwin’s “descent with modification.”

(excerpted from Frank Sherwin, Insects in Darwin's Ointment Acts & Facts April 2011, Institute for Creation Research)

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References (selected)

1. Sherwin, F. 2005. Butterflies vs. Macroevolution. Acts & Facts. 34 (2).

2. Yates, D. Rare insect fossil reveals 100 million years of evolutionary stasis. University of Illinois press release, February 3, 2011.

3. Sherwin, F. 2006. Fruit Flies in the Face of Macroevolution. Acts & Facts. 35 (1).

4. Burke, M. K. et al. 2010. Genome-wide analysis of a long-term evolution experiment with Drosophila. Nature. 467 (7315): 587-590.

5. Swift, D. W. 2002. Evolution Under the Microscope. Stirling, UK: Leighton Press, 236-239.