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Monday, January 23, 2023

Echolocation

One of the amazing abilities of some animals is the ability to navigate and find food by echolocation. This is an incredible biological appurtenance, one whose mindless, accidental origin seems utterly implausible.

The number and complexity of organs that are involved in this amazing sense is astounding. These organs enable the animal to produce, send, receive and process sound waves.They enable them to use these sound waves to determine the distance, size and composition of a potential food source.

According to Darwinian evolution these structures all evolved nearly simultaneously by fortuitous genetic mutations and without any goal or purpose, and they all somehow managed to emerge in numerous different species of animals - bats, dolphins, whales, some (but not all) birds and a few others.

How? Let's not settle for any waving of the magic wand type answers, answers in which we're told that given enough time, blind, impersonal processes can somehow work magic.

Intelligent, thoughtful people should be more critical of such answers and less gullible in accepting them.

Nor should we settle for scientific "promissory notes," assurances that even though the evolution of such abilities is a mystery today, someday we'll find out how it happened. The problem isn't so much explaining precisely how it happened but rather explaining how it could have happened.

What plausible pathway could mindless forces have unintentionally followed that could've resulted in a set of systems and subsystems of such complexity and controlled by such sophisticated information as we see in an animal's echolocation sense?

Intelligent engineers can accomplish such feats, but how can unintelligent, random processes like genetic mutation, a process which is almost always harmful to an organism generate what's shown in this video describing the dolphin's echolocatory apparatus.

Watch the video and ask yourself which explanation for what you see is most plausible - intelligent engineering or mindless chance.