Evolution News - How Tiger Beetles Have Evolved an Unusual Form of Batsian Mimicry - Or Is This Unintelligent Design?

Tiger beetles are fierce predators, running quickly after smaller insects and crushing them with their large mandibles.

Photo: Geena Hill.

Tiger beetle, Lophyra sp.

Muhammad Mahdi Karim - Own work via Wikimedia (GFDL 1.2)

Tiger beetles fight off bat attacks with ultrasonic mimicry – Research News

The idea of predator-prey arms races is of course entirely inconsistent with the childish notion of intelligent design, because constantly designing solutions to problems you created earlier as solutions to even earlier problems you created, is not an act of intelligence.

And yet creationists continue to believe in intelligent [sic] design despite the abundance of these competitive arms races in the natural world.

It seems they have no difficulty in holding several pairs of mutually contradictory views of their putative designer god simultaneously. It is supremely intelligent and acts in ways that can only be described as supremely stupid.

It is omnibenevolent but designs ways to increase the suffering in the world with its parasites; it is omnipotent but powerless against another supernatural designer called 'sin'; and by the way, it is the only supernatural entity capable of designing living thing, so 'evidence' of design (i.e. something a creationist can't understand how it could have evolved) is proof of its existence.

Creationism in Crisis - Batty Evolution On Solomon Islands

Islands in the Vona Vona Lagoon of the New Georgia Group, Solomon Islands. This island group hosts four species of Hipposideros bats, including the two featured in the study of convergent evolution across the archipelago.

Credit: RG Moyle

Diadem leaf-nosed bat, Hipposideros diadema

Michael Pennay via Wikimedia (CC BY 2.0)

Researchers parse oddity of distantly related bats in Solomon Islands that appear identical | KU News

There is something strange about the Solomon Islands, lying east of Papua New Guinea and northeast of Australia. The bats that inhabit the islands seem to have evolved in ways that are difficult to understand.

Before creationists get over-excited and think we've found an example of species that didn't evolve but were made by magic, the question is not whether they evolved, but how? The scientists are in no doubt that the process was an evolutionary one and show no signs of concluding that a supernatural entity was involved. The puzzle is that genetically distinct species on different islands, occupying the same niche, have evolved such a high degree of phenotypic convergence that they are almost indistinguishable, so were previously classified as the same species, although genetically they are not even close relatives. The question is what is it about the environment on these islands that has driven this high level of convergence.

Each of the islands in the archipelago has a population of bats, usually 3-5 species on each island, consisting of a small, medium and large species and on islands with four species, an extra-large. One island has five species so gets an extra small bat.

That all seemed fairly straightforward on the assumption that the five distinct species had each found a niche on each island, and they certainly looked identical when comparing the different sized bats on each island. However, that was before we had DNA sequencing techniques.

DNA analysis has shown that the large bats on different islands, although identical in appearance, are not closely related - they have converged on that appearance from different ancestral bats.

This was discovered by a research team of scientists from University of Melbourne, Australia, the University of Kansas, USA, Jame Cook University, Australia and others. Their work is published open access in the journal, Evolution (the National Journal of Organic Evolution). It is explained in a University of Kansas news release:

Creationism in Crisis - Oldest Known Bat Fossil Give Clue to Evolution of Flying Mammals

Creationism in Crisis

Oldest Known Bat Fossil Give Clue to Evolution of Flying Mammals

Photo of a newly described bat skeleton representing Icaronycteris gunnelli. This specimen is the holotype, the name-bearing representative of a new species, and is in the American Museum of Natural History’s research collections.

Mick Ellison/© AMNH

Fig 3. Skeleton of paratype of Icaronycteris gunnelli
(ROM:Palaeobiology-Vertebrate Fossils:52666).

Rietbergen TB, van den Hoek Ostende LW, Aase A, et al. (2023)

Oldest Bat Skeletons Ever Found From Wyoming Fossils | AMNH

The evolution of bats is far from clear because of the paucity of fossils. It is interesting therefore that the oldest known fossilised bat has been discovered in Wyoming, USA, in the Green River Formation. This adds just another chapter to the account of how the Green River Formation refutes creationism, as I'll go into shortly.


First, a bit about the evolution of bats from ChatGPT:

Bats are a unique group of mammals that have adapted to a life of flight. The evolution of bats is a subject of much debate among scientists, but recent studies suggest that they likely evolved from small, arboreal, insect-eating mammals around 50 million years ago. Fossil evidence from the Eocene period supports this theory, showing that early bats had elongated fingers with membranes stretched between them, much like modern bats.

One of the most significant challenges in studying the evolution of bats is understanding how flight evolved. Recent studies have shed light on this question, suggesting that flight evolved in bats through a process known as "penny-plane" aerodynamics, where the wings generate lift by creating a vortex of air. This mechanism is unique to bats and is not found in any other flying animals.

Another interesting aspect of bat evolution is their remarkable ability to echolocate, or use sound waves to navigate and locate prey. This ability likely evolved early in bat evolution, and recent studies suggest that it may have co-evolved with the development of flight.

Overall, the evolution of bats is a fascinating topic that continues to be the subject of much research and debate. By studying the fossil record and the behavior of modern bats, scientists are gaining new insights into the origins and adaptations of these unique mammals.

Reference:

Simmons, N. B., & Seymour, K. L. (2021). Evolution of bats. In Mammalogy (pp. 294-317). Springer, Cham.

ChatGPT. (2023, April 14). Tell me about the evolution of bats, with references, please. [Response to a question]. Retrieved from https://github.com/openai/gpt-3

Before moving on to the new fossil, I'll deal briefly with the Green River Formation, because it utterly refutes another creationist article of faith - the alleged Global flood a few thousand years ago.

Bats - The Malevolent Designer's Laboratory?

Black fruit bats, Pteropus alecto

Source: Wikipedia.
Credit: Welbergen., CC BY-SA 3.0

Genomic Basis of Bat Superpowers Revealed: Like How They Survive Deadly Viruses | | SBU News

There is a sudden surge of interest in biological circles about bats and in particular why they are the source of so many deadly viral diseases, probably as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic and sciences attempt to understand it and find better treatments and a cure.

While I've been working on my next book, "The Malevolent Designer: Why Nature's God is not Good", a book also prompted by the Covid-19 pandemic, a couple of papers were published which suggest, if we accept for a moment the Creationist intelligent [sic] design argument, that their putative designer uses bats as laboratories for developing ever more deadly viruses such as SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus which causes Covid-19, MERS, rabies and ebola.