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What Has Evolution Wrought?

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The power of evolution to bring about remarkable biological designs never ceases to amaze me. Scratch that. The power of evolution to delude its followers into thinking it can bring about remarkable biological designs never ceases to amaze me. That’s better.

Butterfly’s Navigation Secret Revealed in Flight Simulator
By LiveScience Staff
http://www.livescience.com/animalworld/050504_butterfly_navigation.html

The monarch butterfly is known to use the angle of sunlight as a navigational guide on its annual fall migration from across North America to Mexico. But how it processes the information has been a mystery.

Now scientists have used a flight simulator and peeked inside the butterfly brain to learn that their light-detecting sensors are hard-wired to their circadian clocks, allowing the creatures to compensate for the time of day.

Monarchs are very adept at sensing ultraviolet light, a wavelength of sunlight that is invisible to the human eye and causes skin cancer. The butterflies can detect the sun’s angle even on a cloudy day, allowing them to always head South. Scientists have known this for years.

Researchers led by Steven Reppert of University of Massachusetts Medical School found evidence last year that the butterflies rely on polarized ultraviolet light. Polarized light has been filtered to vibrate in one plane instead of all directions. In sunglasses, polarization reduced glare.

In the new work, Reppert and his colleagues discovered that ultraviolet photoreceptors dominate the part of the monarch eye that specializes in polarized light detection.

In flight tests, they blocked UV light and found the butterflies lost their way.

The new study also pinpointed the location of the butterfly’s circadian clock, a processor in the brain that governs 24-hour activity and metabolic cycles of insects, humans and other animals. Key genes responsible for the clock’s molecular “ticks” were expressed in a brain region called the dorsolateral protocerebrum. In there, tiny neural fibers connect the clock to polarization photoreceptors in the eye.

“This pathway has not been described in any other insect, and it may be a hallmark feature of butterflies that use a time-compensated sun compass,” Reppert and his colleagues write in the journal Cell.

Comments
ahhh! Amazing what random mutations, plus natural selection added with millions of years are able to design. The fact that we don't see it happen today should not stop the Darwinist at anytime. In fact, the fact that it never happens today is the evidence that it happened in the past.Matz
November 23, 2005
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I say again, the theory of Intelligent Design EXPECTS to find evidence of design, ingenuity, creativity. Evolution is always astounded. Therefore ALL such discoveries by evolutionists are accidental. ID scientists can AND WILL seek out such intelligence, looking to learn from design in nature to develop and improve technology.Red Reader
November 22, 2005
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"The new study also pinpointed the location of the butterfly’s circadian clock," CLOCK! As in Paley's watch. Navigation this precise requires a pretty good clock. In Paley's day, a good clock for a sailing ship could be life or death. Salvadorscordova
November 22, 2005
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Such neural linking looks like a pretty small step for evolution, the way I see it. Neural wiring is one of the most flexible things in nature. A lot occurs even after maturity. So the buildup of hereditary tendencies doesnt seem very far fetched. Might not even be a species change. It's well withing what one might call micro-evolution. Neither ID'ers nor Darwinists need jump to any conclusions, unless in their prejudices, they just cant resist. What kind of amazing coincidence will it be that it will be very hard to find fossil evidence of such a delicate and microscopic transition? I wouldnt worry about it. Just enjoy the thrill of discovery -- all together now!jesguessin
November 22, 2005
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Typical Darwinist and Evolutionist Fundamentalists see this as another amazing example of evolution. Obviously this is a sign of Intelligent Design and the evolutionist atheists are just deluding themselves.wheadgib
November 22, 2005
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Isn't it interesting that the circadian "clock" and UV receptor cells are linked up. From an "informational" point of view, this is what you would expect. It's computer-like in it's structuring of inter-activity. But, of course, we all know that NS is responsible for computers. (Without NS, humans would never have arisen. Q.E.D.)PaV
November 22, 2005
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I recently heard Jonathan Wells in a radio interview. He said, 'I'll give you a hundred intermediate forms between species and you still could not show me a working biochemical pathway between them, under Darwin's mechanism...' [not a verbatum quote, but pretty close to what he said]. Anyway, I thought he really hit the nail on the head here.Bombadill
November 22, 2005
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And there lies the core issue, eh? I have no problem with adaptation within a species. This is what science actually observes. What it does not observe is change on the macro scale. And no one has presented a viable pathway, on the biochemical level, for one species evolving into another. It's time for the Darwinian Fundamentalists to face up to this fact and abandon their steamboat-era religion with all of it's hand-waving tales.Bombadill
November 22, 2005
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