Stick disguise evolved early, claim scientists, according to reports in Nature News 25 April 2018 and Proceedings of Royal Society B 25 April 2018 DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2018.042.
Stick insects, as their name suggests, have long slender bodies and many have plate-like projections called lamellae, which also help make them look like twigs. These features are considered to have evolved to disguise the insects from predators.
Scientists at Capital Normal University in Beijing, China, have found a fossil stick insect in Burmese amber dated as 99 million years old. The insect has the long thin body and lamellae seen in living stick insects.
According to Nature, “The new specimen is the oldest known stick insect to boast such features. The find shows that stick and leaf insects evolved the trick of imitating vegetation earlier than previously thought.”
Editorial Comment: The idea that any living creature evolved features for camouflage to avoid predators makes no sense, even within evolutionary theory. How would the presence of a predator change the genes of non-camouflaged creatures to form new structures? In a ‘survival of fittest’ world, those that already had camouflage survived, those that didn’t were lunch. If any avoided predators without camouflage, there was no stimulus to develop it.
We also need to careful about labelling any animal feature as camouflage. We may find that certain features make animals hard to see, but that doesn’t mean other animals can’t see them. Recent research on how animals perceive the world shows it is not always the same as how we see things.
Furthermore, functions that are ascribed to camouflage have recently been found to have other functions. For example chameleons use their brilliant colour-changing ability to communicate with other chameleons. See our report Chameleon Colour Not Camouflage here.
Now start seeing things God’s way because in the original very good world that God made, animals did not need to avoid predators simply because all animals initially ate plants. After some animals became predators (post flood) stick insects may have had some survival benefit from their unusual shape, but only because they already had these features.
If being shaped like twigs helps stick insects survive today it is a reminder the world has degenerated, and is not evolving in any direction. So that makes this fossil stick insect labelled as the oldest stick insect with lamellae of absolutely no help to the theory of evolution.
Yes we have said it before, it is exactly what you would expect for the Creator of life who created the land animals, including the creeping things as fully formed creatures. This fossil stick insect is fully formed with the same features seen in living stick insects. Therefore, we can confidently say stick insects have multiplied after their kind, just as Genesis says.
Evidence News vol. 18, No 4
2 May 2018
Creation Research Australia
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