Perhaps it was William Shakespeare who helped give the bat a sinister connotation when he wrote:

BY WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE (from Macbeth)

Double, double toil and trouble;
Fire burn and caldron bubble.
Fillet of a fenny snake,
In the caldron boil and bake;
Eye of newt and toe of frog,
Wool of bat and tongue of dog,

Lately of course the Wuhan lab has finished the demolition of the reputation of this wonderful creature, never meant to be made into soup. When you take out a subscription to Creation Magazine you too can subscribe to their daily InfoBytes, at no extra charge, and receive such interesting articles. The latest issue is just out – quite the best value colour magazine on the market – and a cracker of a read – it also teaches TRUTH!

https://creation.com/

Going batty over evolution

by David Catchpoole

Modern-day engineers are increasingly looking to nature for inspiration in solving design problems, a field known as biomimetics. But rather than acknowledge that such intricate design needed a Designer (Romans 1:20), some instead look to evolution.

Increasingly however, as research uncovers hitherto-unexpected features, capacities and complexity of living things, it just gets harder for evolutionists.

A recent study published in the journal Bioinspiration and Biomimetics revealed unexpected aerodynamics of bat flight.¹ Bats are highly manoeuvrable, and the study aimed to better understand how bats fly—information which could help design small flying vehicles, such as those being developed for military reconnaissance.²Here’s where things have become very problematic for evolutionists

Using high-speed video cameras to record the 3D wing and body movements of flying lesser short-nosed fruit bats, Cynopterus brachyotis, the researchers observed some flight characteristics unique to bats. The stretchy skin on a bat’s wings interacts with air differently compared to the firmer wings of birds and insects. This elasticity, combined with dozens of joints (even more than in a human hand),³ allows bats to generate unusual wing shapes and motions, e.g. that give more lift at higher angles of attack—the angle at which the wing meets the air on the downstroke. This may allow bats to fly at low speeds with less risk of stalling.

And the bats’ multiple-jointed wings not only allow for subtle adjustments to the wing shape during flight—thus improving efficiency—but can also be folded very close to the body to reduce drag. This means that the upstroke of a bat’s wing is very different to that of birds. “The bat almost completely collapses its wings,” said one of the researchers, Kenneth Breuer of Brown University (USA).

Not only was the research team intrigued by the ability of bats to generate different wing shapes and motions that other flying creatures can’t, they also wanted to understand “the evolutionary path that created it”.⁴Bats have always been bats, just as they were designed to be

However, here’s where things have become very problematic for evolutionists, in the light of the researchers’ findings. LiveScience put it this way: “The complexity of bats’ wings also challenges some current theories that say bats evolved from some kind of flying squirrel-type creature.”³

As one of the Brown University researchers, Sharon Swartz, an associate professor in ecology and evolutionary biology, explained, “The assumption has always been that bats evolved from some sort of flying squirrel-type animals.” However, such is the newly-realized complexity of the bat’s “long, skinny flapping wing” compared to the “square gliding wing” of the various “flying squirrel-type animals” that Swartz concludes that, “now it doesn’t look like bats have any relationship to these gliding things.”⁴

Not that Swartz herself thinks that evolution might not be true, opining that “gliding appears to have evolved seven times in mammals”, but “not a single one of those groups is closely related to bats.”³

Indeed not—bats have always been bats,⁵ just as they were designed to be (Genesis 1:21).⁶