Todd WoodAnyone who knows me at all knows that I break down creationist biology into five main components: design, natural evil, systematics, speciation, and biogeography. I figure these are the five most basic components of pretty much any question about origins, and until we have a good handle on all five, answering specific questions will always be extremely tentative. I’ve decided to start posting some ideas about these five components from time to time. Perhaps you’ll find that helpful, and maybe one of you will give me some helpful feedback.
The following article has been reblogged with permission from Todd’s Blog. The views expressed reflect those of the author, and not necessarily those of New Creation.
Today, I was thinking about the origin of predators, animals that hunt and kill for their food. It’s easy to fall into a sort of superficial confidence about predation. Look at bears, for example. There you have a baramin with species that will eat just about anything, and if you include the giant panda, then you have an obligate herbivore. It would be easy to say that predators are merely predators because of behavior. At the Fall, God just modified their behavior from eating just plants to eating meat. Or perhaps they figured out hunting later.
I like to start with that in my origins class, and lull my students into a false sense of security that predation is easy to explain. Then I hit them with much harder cases. Take venomous snakes. Every last one is an obligate carnivore, and they have those amazing fangs. The pit vipers have heat sensors that can detect their prey, then they take them out with a poisonous bite. The venom delivery involves modifications to the anatomy of the teeth and glands and to the biochemistry of the enzymes that are concentrated in the venom. It can’t be reduced to just behavior. Snakes were designed to kill.
Jellyfish are even better. They’re nothing but goo, tentacles, and a mouth. The tentacles have those delightful nematocysts on them. Nematocysts are amazing. Normally, they’re a little pouch with a coiled wire inside and a little trigger (cnidocil) on the surface. When something comes into contact with that trigger, the coiled wire shoots out like a little harpoon, injecting their victims with poison. The victims are usually fish or some other aquatic critter, but as any unsuspecting swimmer can tell you, it’s no fun brushing against one of these guys. If you’re unlucky enough to be a fish, the venom usually dispatches you, and you get drawn into the jellyfish’s mouth by the tentacles. Jellyfish were designed to kill.
I could go on and on with more examples, but you get the point. How do we explain all this design? Wasn’t creation supposed to be “very good?” Weren’t the animals given only plants to eat? Didn’t death come to creation from the sin of Adam? How could things be designed to kill?
Actually, I don’t think these things are that much of a problem. Sure, they’re designed. The real question is when were they designed? What I think these things do for us is deepen our understanding of the Curse. Think about this for a second: How could the world we live in now exist without animal death? To be honest, it couldn’t. Overpopulation alone would bring it to a grinding halt, not to mention the need for a completely different kind of ecological cycling of nutrients. And the list goes on. No, if the world before the Fall had no animal death, then it must have been very different from the world we live in now.
It follows then that the Curse wasn’t merely some minor tweak to the original perfection. Whole components of creation had to be redesigned, and that redesign must have included predators. The more interesting question is not where or when predators originated, but how. What kinds of mechanisms did God use? Was it a direct intervention? Or was there some kind of pre-designed mechanism involved? That’s a question that can actually be researched by studying predators and the attributes that give them their hunting skills. One of these days, I hope our research at Core Academy of Science will help us to better understand where predators come from.
Christian Ryan
Noel Grimes
Paul Garner
Jake Ramgren
Kurt Wise
The problem here is you have to assert that snakes were created after the Fall. When the common, but not necessarily confirmed, idea was that a snake caused the Fall.
Why would you have to assert that snakes were created after the Fall? That does not make sense. A better view is that snakes adapted according to the new conditions presented to them after the Fall. The “snake” in the Garden of Eden did not exactly cause the Fall, but it was either possessed by or a manifestation of Satan, who deceived Eve and motivated Adam to sin, which caused the Fall.
Could it be that there were multiple stages to the development of predators? As mentioned in the article, the fall represented a fundamental change to the then natural order. Could it be that, before the fall, these animals were designed with these characteristics in order to defend themselves, not from predators, but from other environmental factors. If an animal is made to slither on the ground, might it be designed with faculties to alert and prevent things from trampling them? The same for a soft animal,’ with tentacles that catch the drifting biomass of the seas; could they have been built with a mechanism for stopping other animals from disturbing the nets they form with their arms?
With violence increasing and the earth corrupting between the fall and the flood: mechanisms of defense becoming mechanisms of offense makes sense to me. Especially after the flood, where these mechanisms of offense would reasonably develop to meet the needs of an openly carnivorous world.
Im not sure if the fossil~record records the realities of fauna in the earlier portions of the pre-flood world, but in that period I’d assume to find the answers to these kinds of topics.
I could see there being a varying degree of stages in the development of predators depending on genetic and environmental conditions. Certainly predatory behaviors began at some point during the Antediluvian period in several different animal groups, and carried over across the Diluvian period into and past the Postdiluvian period, with many animals today being very specialized for predation. Although many are still capable of consuming plants, such as the example of that lion that wouldn’t eat meat. It could also involve them developing features not explicitly intended for carnivory lifestyles but which developed in that direction over time and given the circumstances.
I also believe most or all of the early fossil record may have been produced by the global flood, so we probably won’t find anything in the fossil record to indicate what the progression towards carnivory looked like or when it started more exactly.
I would propose that God had pre-designed the organism with genetic information that allows for the development of these features, which could have multiple uses, and these particular combinations of features which were optimal for developing an effective predator as needed given the new conditions introduced following that divine curse or cosmic corruption event. I’d be really interested to hear what other ideas and research may come from other creation scientists!
Another thing I wish to note is that, while the need to breed would today imply the problems of overpopulation without carnivores, this would not necessarily have been a problem before the Fall of Man, as the need to breed had as a purpose to fill the Earth with life, and when the planet had been filled with animal life, then there would be no more need to breed, and thus no need for carnivores, whereas now in a post-Fall world creatures have to breed in order to survive.
This may also relate to Jesus describing how there will be no marrying on the New Earth, because the world will already be filled up with all the saved people who lived and died in this present world, and I assume the same would be said for animals in that future eternity, and so carnivores wouldn’t be needed there either, but the cosmos would be restored to its original paradise without death and suffering.
Originally, we would merely take part in working with God by forming family relationships in marriage and breeding, but in our current context, we breed in order to survive and learn lessons in addition to that original purpose.