Page 654 - Atlas of Creation Volume 2

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 sig-
nals, 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 diffi-
culty 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 emit-

ted 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 evo-
lution 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 per-

fectly 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:

Bats' sonar system is more sensitive and efficient
than any technological sonar systems so far con-
structed.

652 Atlas of Creation Vol. 2