Why Are Asexual Animals Rare?

The Amazon Molly reproduces without any genetic contribution from a male (click for credit)
Most biology students know that there are two forms of reproduction: sexual and asexual. In sexual reproduction, the genome of the offspring is made from two contributors: the male parent and the female parent. In asexual reproduction, a single organism reproduces, and the offspring are genetically identical (barring any mutations) to the single parent. In general, bacteria reproduce asexually, while most animals and plants reproduce sexually. However, there are some animals that can reproduce asexually. Sea stars, hydra, and planarians are examples.

What most biology students don’t know is that there are examples of individual species of animals that reproduce asexually, even though other very similar animals reproduce sexually. Take, for example, the Amazon molly (Poecilia formosa), which is pictured above. It is thought that this species arose when a female Atlantic molly (P. mexicana) sexually reproduced with a male sailfin molly, (P. latipinna). While both the mother and the father (as well as all other members of the genus) reproduce sexually, the Amazon molly reproduces asexually. So when this interesting fish produces offspring, they are all genetically identical to the parent, except in certain rare instances, such as when mutations occur.

Now interestingly enough, there are a few forms of asexual reproduction in animals, and the one employed by the Amazon molly is called “gynogenesis.” In this form of asexual reproduction, a male is needed, but he contributes nothing to the genetics of the offspring. Essentially, the female produces eggs that have the full complement of genes (technically called a “diploid egg”), but they cannot begin development into offspring until they are stimulated by the presence of a male’s sperm. The problem, of course, is that all Amazon mollys are female. As a result, the Amazon molly “mates” with similar fishes, usually ones from the same genus.

One really interesting question related to all this is, “Why is it rare?” After all, sexual reproduction is annoying. You have to find a member of your own species that is the opposite gender. The Amazon molly’s form of asexual reproduction still requires a male, but it can be from a wide range of species. As a result, it is much easier for the Amazon molly to find a mate. Why, then, isn’t this kind of reproduction found very often in animals?

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The Faith of Some Evolutionists is Mind-Boggling

I just came across an article in the journal Science called “Irremediable Complexity?” 1 In the article, the authors describe an evolutionary idea called “constructive neutral evolution,” which was first proposed in 1993. The paper starts out stating something that is quite obvious:

Many of the cell’s macromolecular machines appear gratuitously complex, comprising more components than their basic functions seem to demand.

Of course the cell seems “gratuitously complex” to an evolutionist, since an evolutionist is forced to believe that everything found in cells (as well as the cells themselves) developed as a result of random processes acted on by natural selection. You would not expect amazingly complex things to be produced that way. Nevertheless, when you look at cells, you see all sorts of amazing complexity. Of course, those of us who understand science know that the cell’s machinery is not gratuitously complex. It is simply very well designed by a Designer who built a lot of adaptability and diversity into His creation.

The paper goes on to ask how we can understand such “gratuitous complexity” in light of evolution. The real answer is that you cannot. However, that’s not the answer an evolutionist likes, so the authors have to come up with something else. They quickly reject the widely-held adaptationist belief that the complexity is just the result of natural selection preserving any random changes that improve basic function. While they admit that this view can explain some of the simpler aspects of the cell, it clearly fails when discussing some of the really complex parts of the cell.

Their reasoning is quite valid, but their proposed solution takes even more faith to believe than the adaptationist view!

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A Small Brain Does NOT Mean A Low Intelligence

A bumblebee has a small brain but can do complex calculations (click the image for its credit)
As I mentioned in a previous post, because they are not willing to understand that it has been designed by an incredibly intelligent and powerful Designer, evolutionists are forced to look at nature in a ridiculously simplistic way. Take the naive evolutionary idea that brain size correlates with intelligence. Because evolutionists can’t appreciate the incredible design that went into producing brains, they generally assume that the smaller the brain, the lower the intelligence of the organism. Nearly a year ago, I reviewed The Design of Life , which discusses some powerful evidence against this silly notion. Recent research1 on bumblebees has just added more evidence to the pile.

In the research, the investigators wanted to know how a bumblebee decides the order in which it visits flowers. It has been observed for quite a while that bees tend to visit the flowers they have identified as good food sources in a predictable order. In other words, they don’t fly “willy nilly” amongst the flowers they visit. Instead, the have a planned flight route. This has been called trapline foraging, because human trappers typically follow a preplanned route when checking the traps they have set.2

The question the authors wanted to address was how the bees arrive at their preplanned “trapline” route. Do they just visit the flowers in the same order in which the flowers were originally discovered, or is there more thought given to the process? In the end, the researchers were able to show that there is a lot of thought devoted to the process.

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How Bacteria Talk

Evolutionists have always wanted a “simple” life form to exist. After all, to make the leap from nonliving chemicals to living systems, there must be something that is alive in every sense of the word, but at the same time, is reasonably simple. For a long time, evolutionists wanted bacteria to represent that “simple” life form.

As I make clear in my biology textbook, however, there is no such thing as a simple life form, and that holds true for bacteria as well. The more we learn about them, the more we learn how complex they really are. One of the surprises that has emerged in the past few decades is that bacteria actually talk to one another. They have an incredibly complex means of communication, but Dr. Bonnie Bassler (a professor at Princeton University) does an excellent job of describing it in the following video:

Even though it is 18 minutes long, it is worth watching. She not only tells you how important bacteria are to nature and to you, she explains bacterial communication in a very easy-to-understand manner.

What I find interesting about it is how she and I take such a different view of what the data really mean. She says that because we now know bacteria have one language to talk to other members of their own species and a second language to talk to the bacterial community as a whole, it is clear that bacteria really “set up the rules” for communication between cells. Thus, the communication that makes your cells able to work together so that you survive is simply a more advanced version of what bacteria were able to evolve billions of year ago. I look at the same data, however, and see incredible evidence for design. Just as a common genetic code tells us there is a common designer for creation, the fact that cellular communication is common amongst all the cells in creation tells us that cellular communication is the result of a preplanned design.

Regardless of how you look at what these data mean, the facts are amazing, and Dr. Bassler does an excellent job of communicating them!

Here’s What You Do When A Fossil Find Contradicts Evolution

A spider trapped in amber.
(Image from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
File:Spider_in_amber_(1).jpg)
Many trees produce resin, a thick liquid that typically oozes from wounds in the tree. While some scientists view resin as a waste product of the tree, resins have been shown to protect certain trees from insects, fungi, and other pests.1 Thus, resin is probably something purposefully produced by the tree.

If resin hardens, it forms amber, which is considered valuable both as a component for jewelry as well as a means by which fossils can be preserved. The photo above, for example, shows a spider that has been remarkably well-preserved by amber. It is assumed that the spider was trapped in a tree’s resin, and then the resin hardened around the spider. Because this forms a nearly airtight container, decomposition is greatly reduced, allowing for the formation of an incredibly well-preserved fossil.

Not surprisingly, different kinds of trees will produce different kinds of resin, which leads to different kinds of amber. Currently, there are five known classes of amber, based upon the specific chemical compounds that make up the amber. It has been generally thought (quite reasonably) that the chemicals in the amber are reflective of the kind of tree that originally produced the resin. However, that thinking will have to change in order to preserve the hypothesis of evolution.

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Sex Really Complicates Things!

Drosophila melanogaster (Image by http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Aka)
Evolutionists have always looked at nature in an overly simplistic way. They are forced to do so by their preconceived notions. As I mentioned previously, evolutionists cannot begin to appreciate the complex nature of genetics. If they did, they would understand that mutations cannot possibly add information to the genome and, as a result, they would understand that evolution has strict limits. It can only “tinker” with the genetic information that already exists in a population in order to produce individuals that are more fit to survive certain conditions. We call that “microevolution.” It cannot produce fundamentally new and innovative biological structures, which is what is necessary for macroevolution to occur. Thus, while microevolution (which has been demonstrated in both nature and the lab) is consistent with what we know about genetics, macroevolution (which has never been demonstrated in nature or the lab) is not consistent with what we know about genetics.

Of course, evolutionists won’t give up their overly simplistic view of nature, because it is necessary in order for them to cling to their dogma. As a result, they make many predictions, which time and time again are falsified by the data. Not surprisingly, a detailed study of microevolution in the fruit fly known as Drosophila melanogaster has falsified yet another one of their predictions.

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Every Year, There is Less Junk DNA

Image from http://sandwalk.blogspot.com/2008/02/theme-genomes-junk-dna.html

The evolutionary mindset produces all sorts of pathologies in modern science, but it has probably wreaked the most havoc in the field of genetics. Because DNA is so incredibly well designed, assuming that it is the result of random processes guided by natural selection has hampered our understanding of it significantly. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the concept of junk DNA. The term was coined by Susumu Ohno back in 1972.1 He applied it to all parts of an organism’s DNA that don’t code for proteins. Back then, it was thought that DNA’s only job was to tell a cell which proteins to make and how to make them. If a portion of DNA didn’t do that, to Ohno and most other geneticists at the time, it was simply junk – a leftover vestige of the evolutionary process. To give you an idea of how unreasonable this evolution-inspired idea is, at one time, it was thought that more than 98% of the human genome was composed of junk DNA!


Of course, creationists have always contended that there cannot be much junk DNA in any organism’s genome. Because DNA is so incredibly well designed, any significant amount of junk DNA would cause all sorts of problems. Imagine throwing a bunch of junk into a race car engine. Do you think the engine would work properly if it was filled with junk? Of course not. Since DNA is designed more elegantly than the fastest race car engine today, it is hard to believe it could function properly if it were filled with junk. The creationist view, then, has always been that while there might be a bit of junk DNA that has come from mutations which have degraded the genome over time, the vast majority of all organisms’ DNA serves important purposes, whether or not we understand them.

Not surprisingly, the more we learn about DNA, the more the creationist view is being confirmed. Time and time, again regions of DNA that have been positively identified as “junk” by evolutionists have been demonstrated to have a necessary function. A recent article in the journal Nature is yet another example of this confirmation process.

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The Amazing Archerfish

I know…I know…I used “amazing” in my previous post. However, just as “amazing” is the best adjective to describe bowerbirds, it is also the best adjective to describe this fish. Let’s start with why it’s called the archerfish. It likes to eat insects, but rather than waiting for insects to fall into the water, it knocks them into the water by shooting them with a stream of water. You can see the amazing archerfish in action by watching the following video:

As the video tells you, the archerfish understands that gravity will cause the stream of water to follow a curved path, so it adjusts its aim accordingly. In addition, it compensates for the fact that light bends when it travels from air into water. This causes the target to appear at a different place than where it actually is. Nevertheless, the archerfish isn’t fooled by the optical illusion. It aims its jet of water where the insect actually is, not where it appears to be. If all of that isn’t amazing enough, wait until you read what some recent research has uncovered.

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How Do Bacteria Smell? Very Well!

One of the fundamental ideas behind the evolutionary hypothesis is that organisms fall in a range from “simple” to “complex.” The organisms that are supposed to be simple, like bacteria, are assumed to be more reflective of the kinds of organisms that existed on earth a few billion years ago. As the evolutionist waves the magic wand of time, it is assumed that those “simple” organisms slowly evolved into “complex” organisms. What we see on earth today, then, is a range of complexity in nature. “Simple” organisms (like bacteria) are reminiscent of the first kinds of organisms that existed on earth, and “complex” organisms (like mammals) are the products of the long, slow process of macroevolution.

Of course, this goes counter to the creationist view. In the creationist view, organisms do not fall in a range from “simple” to “complex.” Instead, as my coauthor and I stress throughout our biology book, there is no such thing as a simple organism. Even organisms like bacteria are marvelously complex. Thus, if there is a range of complexity in creation, it is from “really complex” to “ridiculously complex.”

The more we learn about science, the more it confirms the creationist view of complexity. Organisms that evolutionists call “simple” are actually amazingly complex.

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Will Evolutionists Ever Learn?

Cover of the June 25, 2010 edition of the journal Cell, which put the final nail in the coffin of the idea that the primary cilium is useless.
Evolutionists are very fond of the idea that there are useless things scattered throughout the living world. Darwin suspected that there were many, many useless organs in several members of the animal kingdom. After all, since he thought “higher” animals evolved from “lower” animals, he assumed that some of the important organs in the “lower” animals would serve no function in the “higher” animals. Nevertheless, since those organs were already there in the “lower” animals, they might continue to appear in the “higher” animals, because making a useless organ was not enough of a disadvantage for natural selection to remove it. He likened such useless organs to the silent letters in a word – they tell you things about the word’s origin but serve no function. In the same way, a useless organ serves no purpose for the animal, but it does tell you about the animal’s evolutionary ancestors.

Since Darwin, evolutionists have continued to point to useless organs and even useless DNA that supposedly litter the living world. The only problem is that annoying functions keep being discovered for these supposedly useless things. Up until about 2004, it was confidently taught that the human appendix is useless, but now we know it serves a vital function. It was once thought that large sections of the genomes of most organisms have “junk DNA” that serves no useful purpose, but time and time and time again, DNA that was confidently described as useless has been shown to have important functions. Evolutionists have been wrong time and time again when it comes to claiming that a given structure in creation is useless.

Well…we now know that evolutionists were wrong…AGAIN.

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