Supposedly evolution takes millions of years, yet it’s not uncommon to find articles claiming that scientists have observed evolution in action. So what is going on? Does evolution take millions of years, mere decades, or can it happen in “real time”? Well, it really depends on how one defines their terms.

Here’s an article from Phys Org with the headline: “Same species, different sizes: Rare evolution in action spotted in island bats.”

These kinds of articles capture my attention because it provides an opportunity to refute evolution and shed some light on what’s really happening.

Answers in Genesis responded to this article on their news program, doing a fine job refuting these evolutionary claims. I’ll provide my own response, but feel free to check out their refutation.

Evolutionists essentially claim that evolution is a fact, and they mock anyone who doubts or rejects it. However, there are many ways to challenge their claims. Consider, evolution is so elastic that it becomes meaningless as a theory. For instance, no matter what evolutionists observe in biology, they call it evolution. They explain it in evolutionary terms and suggest it proves evolution is a fact. In this case they refer to two groups of leaf-nosed bats of different sizes as “parallel evolution,” meaning that different populations of a species “living in similar environments evolve [emphasis mine] similar features independently.” They also refer to “convergent evolution,” where unrelated animals evolve similar features (like flight in birds, insects, pterosaurs and bats).

So, how is the term “evolve” being used? Nowadays evolutionists like to define evolution as any change in allele frequency in a population over time. This is just a fancy way of saying that the offspring of any organism will be genetically different from their parents, and those differences may be observable in certain ways over time. But there’s nothing remarkable about this. It’s simply a statement of fact regarding what we observe; evolutionists are describing observable changes in evolutionary terms, even though it doesn’t really tell us anything about evolution, including whether it’s a fact or not.

What we don’t see, however, is one kind of organism changing into a different kind of organism, or one kind of organism evolving novel features that did not exist in the genome of the ancestor population. So they’re using the term evolution in a loose sense, hoping their readers won’t notice and will accept evolutionary theory based upon ordinary changes within the genome of a population. This is called a bait-and-switch tactic where two fundamentally different processes are treated as the same.

Evolutionists are also fond of saying that evolution is not directional. They will fight tooth and nail against this idea. Yet this article is a prime example of evolution being directional, which serves as another refutation of evolution. The author and researchers freely admit that these bats have “evolved” similar features independently. If evolution were not directional, then we wouldn’t see this happening over and over again. Why? Because evolutionists claim that evolution doesn’t happen on purpose. It isn’t inevitable or demanded. Animals don’t evolve feathers just because it may be an evolutionary advantage to do so. In the same way, bats and other animals shouldn’t evolve similar features simply because it allows them to avoid competition. Yet these researchers want us to believe these bats are evolving similar features to fill different niches. Dr. Lavery says, “Our research suggests the rapid and repeated evolution of larger bodied bats from smaller bats, each happening independently on separate islands.” He went on to say, “When we created family trees using the bats’ DNA, we found that what we thought was just one species of large bat in the Solomon Islands was actually a case where bigger bats had evolved from the smaller species multiple times across different islands.”

From an evolutionary point of view, why is this happening if evolution is not directional? What’s driving the evolution if evolution is not directional? Is it possible that something other than evolution is occurring, and that’s why we see “two isolated populations of the same species go through the same evolutionary process”? Dr. Lavery recognizes this dilemma: “Something very strong is pushing or selecting for these big bats, and it is strong enough for it to happen multiple times on different islands.”

This seems to violate the idea that evolution is not directional. In this case, bats are said to be evolving to become larger in order to take advantage of a different diet, such as larger prey, like amphibians. But becoming larger implies direction and purpose behind those changes. The bats are moving in the direction of a larger size, and Dr. Lavery suggests: “Over time larger body size may have been part of behavioral and physical adaptations needed to hunt larger prey.” So evolution happens due to need?

Dr. Lavery continues, “We may think of evolution as very slow process, but it can happen rapidly when the conditions are right and two groups are separated and stop interbreeding. They can begin to evolve on different pathways.” 

I’d suggest that the theory of evolution isn’t needed to understand what’s happening here, and that no evolution is occurring at all. Despite describing the bats in evolutionary terms, something different is at work. Rather than “evolving” new features, these organisms already come equipped with the genetic information necessary to express new features. Thus the offspring inherit a larger body size from their parents so that they don’t actively compete with the smaller species. This is consistent with what we know about epigenetics, where environmental factors affect the features of the offspring so that they are better equipped to deal with a changing environment.

Therefore, creation science explains this phenomenon better than evolutionary science. According to creation, God created animals to reproduce after their kind. Those original animals didn’t evolve from any other animal, but were the ancestor of today’s animals. Thus the original kinds came equipped with genetic diversity built into their genome and have since diversified into the variety of animals we see today. Animals aren’t evolving new features, yet they may express new features based on what was preprogrammed into their ancestor’s genome. This elegantly explains why these bats have similar features, why some bats are larger than others, and why the element of direction exists. This is speciation, not evolution.