Science versus Pseudoscience, or, Creationism versus Darwinism

(alternate title) The tan strepsipteran ran in haste to leap into space lest it lose its place in the larval nest of the insect pest in which it is a guest but at Whose behest?


I am going to give us a nice piece of meat to gnaw on here.  First I will give you a secular science article concerning "strepsipteran", that world-famous parasitical insect.  I may reach out to Karl Priest to comment later on this.  For now, as oftentimes I do, my words will be in this color when I comment within an article.  The article itself in both cases will be normal copy.

We begin with a News in Science article:

Raspberry eye looks like living fossil

Monday, 8 November 1999 

eyes

A highly unusual type of multi-faceted eye - resembling a tiny raspberry and not seen since trilobites disappeared hundreds of millions of years ago - has been discovered in a tiny parasitic insect.

Scanning electron micrographs show a) head of the strepsipteran b) eye of a fruit fly c) eye of the strepsipteran Pic: Cornell University
picture credit (notice that a mantis shrimp has a structural resemblance to a strepsipteran?  Design template? The mantis shrimp picture is mine and not from the article).

I could be unkind like Jon Woolf and label the opening statement a "lie", since the author certainly cannot prove that trilobites disappeared hundreds of millions of years ago.  The evidence that they perished in the Noahic Flood is better supported by the evidence in my opinion but certainly this author cannot make this claim with any authority!

Cornell University biologists report, in the latest edition of Science, their discovery that the composite eyes of the parasitic insect, strepsipteran, have only 50 facets compared with the compound eyes of most insects which have many hundreds of lens facets, each sampling only one small point in the insect's visual field.

"No other insect that we know of has eyes quite like this," said Ron Hoy, professor of neurobiology and behavior at Cornell and co-author, with Elke Buschbeck and Birgit Ehmer, of the report. "The only place one may see a comparable eye structure is in the fossils of some kinds of trilobites," he says, referring to the extinct arthropods that lived in shallow seas during the Paleozoic era.
I hope you noticed the second assumption.  Ron Hoy has no proof that there ever was a "Paleozoic era" but rather is presenting someone's educated-in-the-1800's guess.  Typical Darwinist thinking.

Fewer facets does not mean poorer vision, the Cornell biologists believe. The strepsipteran lenses are larger, and each has about 100 receptors, forming an individual retina behind each lens. According to the investigators, this kind of eye is well equipped to sample not points but "chunks" of the visual field, greatly improving visual capability.

"This composite lens arrangement allows the insect to have many more photoreceptors in a given area than would be possible with a compound eye. If you only have so much space on your head for eyes and you want to gather the most light, you want a composite lens eye," says Buschbeck. "The larger lenses of the strepsipteran insects are similar to a large lens of a camera, large insect lenses admit more light, support more photoreceptors and permit higher resolution."
I have previously pointed out that the trilobite eye is/was highly sophisticated, which in and of itself tends to falsify the upward myth of evolution.  But here is a massive problem for Darwinists which is no problem for creationists.  Suppose this eye was passed from trilobite to insect according to Darwinism.  How did a parasitic insect evolve from a bottom-dwelling sea creature and why are there no transitional forms along the way?  Did trilobites just decide to "hopeful monster" themselves from lying in the mud to burrowing into abdomens?  How did such a sophisticated eye appear in such "primitive" arthropods, then reappear in a parasitic insect?   

Actually, we will discover that the parasitic insect has had the same kind of sophisticated eye for "millions of years" in Darwinspeak or "both before and after the Flood" in actual science based on best evidence.  Therefore it is logical that neither organism is primitive at all or an ancestor to the other.  One of the untold lies of Darwinism is the idea that creatures like a trilobite are primitive.  But from what we can tell from the fossil record, the trilobite would be right at home in the ocean today and is simply an organism that got buried by the Flood to the point that none have survived (as far as we know).  Perhaps, like many other "lazarus" organisms, a population of trilobites will be found off the coast of Indonesia or Suriname?  If so, it is unlikely to be much different from the fossilized version. Living strepsipteran specimens resemble those preserved in amber so no evolution there, either.

The seldom-seen parasites are hidden in the bodies of common paper wasp. Females never leave their host. When males do, they are on a specific, hurried mission. In the approximately two hours before they die, the males have to find another wasp that is parasitised by a female, mate and depart.

"Sex pheromones from females probably help males to locate the general neighborhood of a wasp with a female parasite," Ehmer says, "but the male presumably relies on his vision once he is close to the wasp." She said that the importance to the insect of the visual system also is apparent from the volume of optic lobes dedicated to processing visual information, which Ehmer estimates to be 75 percent of the insect's brain.
How could such a process evolve?  There is much more to this, as the next article will point out.  These creatures are highly specialized and the entire process is complex and exacting. 

An insect viewing the world in fewer but larger chunks of the visual field would have an inverted, mirror-image problem. Like any simple lens, each facet inverts or reverses its individual portion of the overall image.

The correction comes about, the Cornell biologists believe, because of chiasmata, X-shaped nerve crossings. The biologists found that behind each of the facets is a nerve that connects it to the brain. The nerve exhibits a chiasma, rotating the nerve 180° around its own axis and re-inverting each portion of the image.