Chapter 14

Animals That Shouldn’t Exist According to Intelligent Design

One of the most entertaining things about evolution is the weirdness of its results. Animals that no rational Creator would have come up with exist perfectly well in our evolved world because they work well enough, and survive from generation to generation.

Two of my favorite animals are ones that make no sense at all from a planning point of view, but are wonderful examples of the strange ways in which animals evolve.

Walking Fish

Let’s start with fish. Any decent ID proponent can tell you that fish were designed to live in water. They have gills to extract oxygen out of the water. They have fins and tails that allow them to swim. The idea that a fish might walk on land seems so obviously wrong to anti-evolutionists that they routinely ridicule the very idea that a fish might walk on land, and use it as an example for why they say that evolution is wrong.

Here is a photograph of a walking fish:

Figure 14.1 A mudskipper climbing onto a rock.

This is a mudskipper. It’s a type of fish.

Mudskippers live in intertidal swamps and mud flats where water levels change every time the tide changes.

Figure 14.2 A mudskipper taking a walk on the beach.

When the tide comes in, this fish does what any sensible fish does when confronted with more water. It hops out and climbs a tree.

Now any decent design proponent can tell you that fish do not climb trees. But the mudskippers failed to read all those ID books and went right ahead and evolved in intertidal areas where getting out of the water to avoid predators—even by scrambling into trees—could help an animal to survive.

Here is a photograph of a mudskipper climbing a tree.

Figure 14.3 A mudskipper climbing a tree.

Of course, a decent design proponent could also tell you that if you are going to make climbing gear, you should not start with fish fins. Unfortunately for them, they didn’t tell this to the fish. Mudskippers have special pelvic fins that help them climb trees.

Here is a picture of the fins that mudskippers use to climb trees.

Figure 14.4 A mudskipper’s special fused pelvic fin that helps with climbing.

As climbing gear they don’t work brilliantly, but they work well enough, and they help the mudskippers survive to reproduce.

It gets weirder. Not only do these mudskipper fish walk, skip, hunt, and climb on land, they even build their nests on land. Here is a photograph of a mudskipper’s nesting burrow. On land.

Figure 14.5 A mudskipper’s nesting burrow.

You can see the two eyes peeking out of the hole in the sand.

It gets weirder still. The eggs that hatch inside the burrow develop in air, not water. That’s right, these fish breed out of water and develop their eggs out of water. What’s more, when oxygen levels get low inside the burrow, the male gulps air (yes, air) from outside the burrow and transports it into the egg chamber in its mouth, and then releases the higher-oxygen air into the egg chamber, so the developing eggs get enough oxygen—from the air.

These fish have gills, but they do their breathing through their skins, and through sacs of air that they trap in their skins. The air sacs are basically simple lungs.

These fish can swim, and do, but they spend as much as 90 percent of their lives out of the water.

As usual, design proponents have failed to look at biology. As examples of design, these fish fail miserably, unless you posit that the Designer has a very weird sense of humor. But as examples of the strange and wonderful variety of life that comes out of evolution, these fish are marvelous.

The Immortal Jellyfish

Now let’s move on to one of life’s most unfair arrangements. Human beings have always yearned for immortality. For thousands of years, our desire for immortality has been the driving force behind stories, legends, quests, and epics. Explorers and alchemists both strove to find it.

Major religions have been built around it. Worshiping one supernatural being or another has been said to be our means of achieving it. Yet somehow the Designer—a supernatural being—left us out when he really did make a living being immortal.

Instead, the Designer awarded immortality, this most sought-after state of being to . . . a jellyfish.

Here it is, the true immortal, known as the immortal jellyfish.48

Figure 14.6 Turritopsis nutricula, the immortal jellyfish.

This species of jellyfish, Turritopsis nutricula, can live, basically, forever. They can avoid death altogether. If these creatures are stressed by wounds, heat, starvation, or even simple old age, then they can simply revert to a juvenile form, make new baby copies of themselves, and start all over again (a diagram of the repeating life cycle of Turritopsis nutricula can be found in Appendix 3). This would be like an insect reverting to being a larva, and then making new copies of that larva, all of which can then grow up. If this were a human being, it would mean reverting to being a child, making dozens of copies of that child, and then letting them all grow up. If the child, or the adult it becomes, at any stage in its life finds itself wounded, without food, senile, or otherwise in distress, it can again regress to childhood, re-multiply, and start all over again. Over and over again, without end.

So the immortal jellyfish doesn’t just have eternal life . . . it has eternal youth. Or at least, continuously restarting youth. Ponce de Leon can eat his heart out! But seriously, why didn’t the Designer do that for us?

Just think, we wouldn’t need plastic surgeons anymore. And no more Botox! Think of all the charlatans we could do away with. No more megavitamin regimens! No more hormone replacement therapy!

And no more religions that tell you that you can have eternal life after you die but only if you do everything just right and nobody can tell you ahead of time if you’re going to make the cut, and you don’t get to see for yourself if it really works anyway because nobody ever comes back to tell you what it’s like.

No wonder ID hates biology.

48. Piraino, S., Boero, F., Aeschbach, B., and Schmid, V. Reversing the life cycle: Medusae transforming into polyps and cell transdifferentiation in Turritopsis nutricula (Cnidaria, Hydrozoa). Biol. Bull. 90:302–312.