From Metamorphosis, the companion book to the film …
Monarchs that emerge in the spring or early summer live for about two to four weeks. But the generation that emerges in late August is genetically equipped to live up to nine months. It’s called the “Methuselah Generation.” This enables these tropical butterflies (that would die if exposed to the freezing winter temperatures of the Midwest and Canada) to migrate as far as 3,000 miles, to a small area of forest in the transvolcanic Mountains of central Mexico. There, the conditions are right to ensure the survival of the Monarchs until the spring.
In March, the Monarchs become sexually active for the first time. They mate and then begin their return migration north. When they reach southern Texas, the females lay their eggs (only on milkweed plants – the only food source their caterpillars will eat) and soon die. Throughout the summer months, new generations of Monarchs emerge and move north – living, again, between two and four weeks.
Then, in early September, a new Methuselah Generation – three or four generations removed from the Monarchs that migrated the previous year – travel from as far north as Canada to the same trees that provided sanctuary for their grandparents and great grandparents, the year before. (P. 22)
The navigational systems they use to reach a forest in Mexico that they have never seen weigh less than a quarter of an ounce.
Note: The issue here is not whether the Monarch’s generational cycles require a miracle, but whether this whole pattern is at all likely to have arisen as a result of natural selection acting on random mutations (Darwinism), as opposed to inbuilt design. Or something else altogether?
Darwinists are stuck at the level of “explaining” metamorphosis, the creature’s total-destruction-recreation life cycle, never mind its community life, strictly as an outcome of their theory – natural selection acting on random mutations – and there they will remain.
See also: Granville Sewell on Metamorphosis
Here are peeks at various segs:
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