The Origin of Bats

One of the most interesting creatures in the mammalian class is without doubt the flying mammal, the bat.

Topping the list of the characteristics of bats is the complex "sonar" system they possess. Thanks to this, bats can fly in the pitch dark, unable to see anything, but performing the most complicated maneuvers. They can even sense and catch a caterpillar on the floor of a dark room.

Bat sonar works in the following way. The animal emits a continuous stream of high-frequency sonic signals, analyses the echoes from these, and as a result forms a detailed image of its surroundings. What is more, it manages to do all of this at an incredible speed, continually and unerringly, while it is flying through the air.

Research into the bat sonar system has produced even more surprising results. The range of frequencies the animal can perceive is very narrow; in other words it can only hear sounds of certain frequencies, which raises a very important point. Since sounds which strike a body in motion change their frequency (the well-known "Doppler effect"), as a bat sends out signals to a fly, say, that is moving away from it, the sound waves reflected from the fly should be at a different frequency that the bat is unable to perceive. For this reason, the bat should have great difficulty in sensing moving bodies.

But this is not the case. The bat continues to catch all kinds of small, fast-moving creatures with no difficulty at all. The reason is that the bat adjusts the frequency of the sound waves it sends out toward the moving bodies in its environment as if it knew all about the Doppler effect. For instance, it emits its highest-frequency signal toward a fly that is moving away from it, so that when the signal comes back, its frequency has not dropped below the threshold of the animal's hearing.

So how does this adjustment take place?

There are two groups of neurons (nerve cells) in the bat's brain which control the sonar system. One of these perceives the echoed ultrasound, and the other gives instructions to the muscles to produce echolocation calls. These regions in the brain work in tandem, in such a way that when the frequency of the echo changes, the first region perceives this, and warns the second one, enabling it to modify the frequency of the sound emitted in accordance with that of the echo. As a result, the pitch of the bat's ultrasound changes according to its surroundings, and sonar system as a whole is used in the most efficient manner.

It is impossible to be blind to the mortal blow that the bat sonar system deals to the theory of gradual evolution through chance mutations. It is an extremely complex structure, and can in no way be accounted for by chance mutations. In order for the system to function at all, all of its components have to work together perfectly as an integrated whole. It is absurd to believe that such a highly integrated system can be explained by chance; on the contrary, it actually demonstrates that the bat is flawlessly created.

In fact, the fossil record also confirms that bats emerged suddenly and with today's complex structures. In their book Bats: A Natural History, the evolutionary paleontologists John E. Hill and James D. Smith reveal this fact in the form of the following admission:

The fossil record of bats extends back to the early Eocene ... and has been documented ... on five continents ... [A]ll fossil bats, even the oldest, are clearly fully developed bats and so they shed little light on the transition from their terrestrial ancestor.157

And the evolutionary paleontologist L. R. Godfrey has this to say on the same subject:

There are some remarkably well preserved early Tertiary fossil bats, such as Icaronycteris index, but Icaronycteris tells us nothing about the evolution of flight in bats because it was a perfectly good flying bat.158

Evolutionist scientist Jeff Hecht confesses the same problem in a 1998 New Scientistarticle:

The origins of bats have been a puzzle. Even the earliest bat fossils, from about 50 million years ago, have wings that closely resemble those of modern bats.159

In short, bats' complex bodily systems cannot have emerged through evolution, and the fossil record demonstrates that no such thing happened. On the contrary, the first bats to have emerged in the world are exactly the same as those of today. Bats have always existed as bats.

157 John E. Hill, James D Smith, Bats: A Natural History, British Museum of Natural History, London, 1984, p. 33. (emphasis added)
158 L. R. Godfrey, "Creationism and Gaps in the Fossil Record," Scientists Confront Creationism, W. W. Norton and Company, 1983, p. 199.
159 Jeff Hecht, "Branching Out," New Scientist, 10 October 1998, vol. 160, no. 2155, p. 14.