Small bird sets new flight record

The May 2024 issue of Scientific American marveled at the recent feat of a pigeon-sized bird, called a Bar-tailed Godwit, in setting a world record by flying nonstop for 11 days from Alaska to Tasmania, just south of Australia.

As the magazine reported: “In October 2022, a bird with the code name B6 set a new world record that few people outside the field of ornithology noticed. Over the course of 11 days, B6, a young Bar-tailed Godwit, flew from its hatching ground in Alaska to its wintering ground in Tasmania, covering 8,425 miles without taking a single break. For comparison, there is only one commercial aircraft that can fly that far nonstop, a Boeing 777 with a 213-foot wingspan and one of the most powerful jet engines in the world.

“During its journey, B6—an animal that could perch comfortably on your shoulder—did not land, did not eat, did not drink and did not stop flapping, sustaining an average ground speed of 30 miles per hour 24 hours a day as it winged its way to the other end of the world. Many factors contributed to this astonishing feat of athleticism—muscle power, a high metabolic rate and a physiological tolerance for elevated cortisol levels, among other things.

“B6’s odyssey is also a triumph of the remarkable mechanical properties of some of the most easily recognized yet enigmatic structures in the biological world: feathers. Feathers kept B6 warm overnight while it flew above the Pacific Ocean. Feathers repelled rain along the way. Feathers formed the flight surfaces of the wings that kept B6 aloft and drove the bird forward for nearly 250 hours without failing” (emphasis in original).

The title of this article? “Why Feathers Are One of Evolution’s Cleverest Inventions” (April 16, 2024). As if mindless evolution could invent anything!

How sad that so many scientists are so steeped in evolutionary fiction that they cannot see reality to give God the glory for creating birds and their amazing flying abilities. God asked Job, as He could well ask these unbelieving scientists, “Does the hawk fly by your wisdom and spread its wings toward the south?” (Job 39:26). No, scientists with all their vaunted knowledge have no idea how to create such a bird or endow it with such remarkable abilities—and neither does their fantasized evolution, which has no knowledge at all. Despite clear evidence of design, scientists deny the Designer (Romans 1:18-21).

Living fossils: a difficulty for evolution

One problem with the geologic column portrayed in many scientific textbooks—showing certain organisms appearing through evolution for only a certain time in past geologic eras—is the existence of what are called “living fossils.” These are creatures that, according to the standard interpretation of the fossil record, showed up and then disappeared through extinction millions of years ago, and yet they are found alive today in the same form. How could that be if evolution was causing creatures to be repeatedly replaced with newer forms over the eons? This casts doubt on the reading of the fossil record.

A recent headline at Live Science reads “Mystery of ‘living fossil’ tree frozen in time for 66 million years finally solved” (Sept. 15, 2023). The reference here is to the Wollemi pine, discovered in 1994 by hikers in a canyon in Wollemi National Park near Sydney, Australia. “Called a ‘living fossil’ by some, the Wollemi pine (Wollemia nobilis) is nearly identical to preserved remains dating to the Cretaceous period (145 million to 66 million years ago). There are now just 60 of these trees in the wild—and these tenacious survivors are threatened by bushfires in the region. It was thought to have gone extinct around 2 million years ago” (ibid.).

Now scientists have decoded the tree’s genome. They imagine a bottleneck of genetic diversity around 10-20,000 years ago and think it’s now reproducing mostly through effectively cloning, with new shoots springing out of the bases—this in reaction to transposons or “jumping genes” leaping to new locations in the genome and producing mutations. But this is also noted to have suppressed disease resistance, which leads one to wonder why it is not extinct after all. Despite the headline, the existence of this living fossil amid supposed evolutionary development is not at all solved.

In 2020, a professor of entomology in Pennsylvania was using his personal insect collection as part of a class when he realized that a dragonfly-like insect with a 2-inch wingspan that he had plucked from the front of a Walmart in Arkansas in 2012 was not, as he had thought, an antlion. Instead it was a Jurassic-Era giant lacewing, Polystoechotes punctatus, the first of its kind recorded in eastern North America in more than 50 years—and the first record of the species ever in Arkansas (“Rare Insect Found at Arkansas Walmart Sets Historic Record, Prompts Mystery,” PennState, Feb. 27, 2023). While these had been known to exist previously in more modern times, the discovery that they had not died out in this part of the world is remarkable and also highlights the issue of these insects of the family ithonidae being basically unchanged for, supposedly, 165 million years.

A great void in space to the north

There’s been some renewed attention of late to the discovery first made some decades back that a vast void north of the earth has few galaxies in relation to the rest of space. This largest void found so far in the universe is called the Boötes Void, in the upper part of the constellation Boötes, near the Big Dipper in the northern sky.

Space.com notes: “Though Boötes is a large constellation, it contains few astronomical objects. In fact, the constellation is the home to the Boötes Void, an area of the universe 250 to 330 million light-years across that is nearly empty, containing only a handful of galaxies, according to NASA” (“Boötes Constellation: Location, Stars and Mythology,” June 28, 2023). Cosmologists now refer to it as a “supervoid” (“The Boötes Void: Why the Universe Has a Mysterious Hole 330 Million Light-Years Across” (BBC Science Focus, Feb. 6, 2022).

An Indian news media site adds: “. . . The Boötes Void, also known as the Great Nothing. According to American space agency NASA, Bootes Void was discovered in 1981 by astronomer Richard Kirshner. It is a roughly spherical region located 700 million light years away from Earth, near the constellation of the same name. Bootes Void is around 330 million light-years wide—a region the Milky Way could fit into billions of times over” (“Boötes Void,” NDTV.com, March 8, 2023).

This discovery was possible only through the technology of modern telescopes, not something discernable through unaided observation. Yet the ancient book of Job in the Bible contains this amazing declaration about God: “He stretches out the north over empty space; He hangs the earth on nothing” (Job 26:7). How could Job have known that northern space was empty? Only God could have revealed it to him. Moreover, how could he have known the earth was suspended in space—when ancient ideas imagined it on pillars or on the back of a god or a stack of primordial animals. This advanced scientific understanding must have been divinely inspired.

Interestingly, there are indications in Scripture that God’s heavenly throne is in the northern sky. Lucifer, the archangel who became Satan, in his rebellion thought to exalt his throne “above the stars” and sit “on the mount of the congregation on the farthest sides of the north . . . above the heights of the clouds” (Isaiah 14:13-14, emphasis added). We also see the statement in Psalm 75:6-7 that exaltation does not come from east, west or south but from God. That seems to put God in the north. Some see a reference here to the temple on the north side of Jerusalem. But Satan’s attempt to usurp God’s throne on the farthest sides of the north came long before the Jerusalem temple. Perhaps there is some association here with the northern void.

In any case, the statement in Job is confirmed by what science has discovered. The Bible is a reliable witness to the past—and to the truth of God, being His inspired Word.