adaptive losses/defects from mutation since creation.In the thousands of years since the Flood, the Romanian cave-dwelling creatures have had time to go through a huge number of their short generational life cycles, allowing them plenty of time for maximum adaptation to their new environment. After many hundreds of generations, the eyeless gene would confer a slight but significant selective advantage. The acidic environment would also be detrimental to eye health. If a fish with eyes bumped into a cave wall in the dark, it could damage the eye surface, introducing infection leading to death. In addition, there may well be a selective advantage to such a loss/defect, as follows.Įyes are complex structures, prone to disease and injury. A mutant gene damaging the genetic information for eye manufacture would have no selection pressure opposing its spread in a lightless environment. Loss of eyesīlind fish, with scars where eyes normally appear, have long been known to exist in certain caves. These recently-discovered Romanian creatures are thus almost certainly the descendants of previously pigmented ancestors cut off from the outside perhaps thousands of years ago (not 5 million, as evolutionists speculate in this instance). However, in a cave without the sun, such a mutation can readily spread through the population. If a creature living in the normal, outside world were to have a mutation causing a loss of its pigment, it would normally be less able to survive, losing some protection against sunlight. Many cave dwellers have long been known to show this. Let’s look at the likely course of events. The giraffe’s neck cannot get progressively longer from stretching over generations, nor shorter from lack of stretching.) Use and disuse do not cause changes which can be inherited-that is, there is no change in the DNA code as a result of use and disuse of bodily parts. (Modern biologists, whether creationist or evolutionist, overwhelmingly disown such beliefs. It is important to understand that the loss of characters such as eyes and pigment does not arise from disuse as such, although most of the public will surely see it in such Lamarckian terms. Genetic loss through mutation is an integral part of the creation model, whereas molecules-to-man evolution requires huge volumes of new, functionally more complex information to arise. The obvious explanation would be similar to the standard evolutionary interpretation, except for the time-scale. Many have large antennae which assist them to find their way around in the dark. However, these degenerate as it matures, so that it is blind as an adult. All are born blind, with the exception of one spider that is born with the usual eight eyes. The animals scuttle for cover when they detect a change in oxygen levels.Īll of them have the condition known as troglomorphy-a loss of coloring pigment, giving them a pale-yellow appearance. There is no photosynthetic vegetation at all.Īir can seep in through tiny fissures, but the atmosphere is very different from outside, with 100 times as much CO 2, one tenth the level of oxygen, and a lot of H 2S, produced by natural sulfur springs. The bacteria are eaten by creatures higher on the ‘food chain’ which are then eaten by others, and so on. These bacteria produce sulphuric acid, which incidentally carves out increasing volumes of space in the limestone. The entire community appears to be fueled by energy from the metabolism of hydrogen sulfide (the foul-smelling ‘rotten egg gas,’ H 2S), carried out by dense mats of bacteria which live on the cave walls. The unique thing about the ecosystem within which these creatures function is that they do not depend, even indirectly, on the energy of sunlight. They include such things as spiders, leeches, millipedes, pill bugs, flatworms, mites, beetles, and water dwellers such as water scorpions and nematode worms. Forty-seven species altogether have been studied by a Romanian scientist, Serban Sarbu, who escaped the communist dictatorship and has only recently been able to resume his work. They are found in air-pockets which can only be reached by diving. A ‘secret kingdom of strange creatures’ was revealed-a group of living things that have clearly been cut off from the outside world for many generations. In 1986, construction workers unexpectedly drilled into the Movile Cave, close to the western (Romanian) coast of the Black Sea.
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