First published: Creation 21(2):41 March 1999 Browse this issue Subscribe to Creation magazine

Brisk biters

Fast changes in mosquitoes astonish evolutionists, delight creationists.

by Carl Wieland

About 100 years ago, bird-biting mosquitoes called Culex pipiens entered the tunnels then being dug for the London Underground (the ‘Tube’). Cut off from their normal diet, they changed their habits to feed on rats and, when available, human beings. During WW2, they attacked Londoners seeking refuge from Hitler’s bombs. Their plaguing of maintenance workers may be the reason the underground variety has been dubbed molestus.

British scientists have now found that it is almost impossible to mate those in the Tube with the ones still living above ground, thus suggesting that they have become a new species¹  (or almost so). This has ‘astonished’ evolutionary scientists, who thought that such changes must take many times longer than this.² 

Informed creationists have long pointed out that the biblical model of earth history would not only allow for the possibility of one species splitting into several³  (without the addition of new information, thus not ‘evolution’ as commonly understood), but would actually require that it must have happened much faster than evolutionists would expect. The thousands of vertebrate species on the Ark⁴  emerged into a world with large numbers of empty ecological niches, often as varied as the two worlds of our mosquito example here. They must have split many times into new species in the first few centuries thereafter, as the bear population, for example, gave rise to polar bears, grizzlies, giant pandas and more.⁵ The observations on these underground mosquitoes are thus exciting news.

Actually, creationists have long suspected that organisms had ‘built-in’ genetic mechanisms for rapid variation—even beyond the normal processes of adaptation where genes, reshuffled by sexual reproduction, are selected in various environments.⁶  Thus, recent discoveries of such mechanisms being still viable today are of very great interest.

For example, there are genes which can ‘jump’ around the chromosome. These are normally kept in check, but Drs Jenny Graves and Rachel O’Neill of La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia, have found that in hybrids, these can undergo ‘rampant’ changes.

This may even be ‘the general mechanism for speciation in all multi-cellular creatures’ (by making it impossible to ‘back-breed’ with a parent population). Graves says, ‘We thought it took millions of years of long-term selection for a jumping gene to be activated. We’ve now shown that it can happen maybe in five minutes after fertilization.’⁷  These are exciting times to be a creationist.

We think that expanding genetic research will likely reveal even more examples of built-in, ‘pre-fab’ mechanisms for rapid change in response to environmental pressures. Ironically, as more such created mechanisms (very far from normal Darwinian ideas) are discovered, they will probably be misconstrued as support for evolution, at the same time as biblical Christians are exulting in their true significance.

References and Notes

1. By the usual definition of not being able to interbreed any more. Return to text.
2. BBC Wildlife magazine (London), September, 1998. Also The London Times, p. 1, 26 August 1998. Return to text.
3. Called speciation, e.g. an original dog/wolf kind on Noah’s Ark giving rise to wolves, dingoes, coyotes, etc. Contrary to the repeated and misleading attacks on creation ministries by ‘progressive creationist’ Hugh Ross, this is not related to ameba-to-man ideas, since it requires no new genetic information. The ancestral species is more generalized, having more information than each (more specialized) daughter population, thus reaching an eventual limit. See also Darwin's Finches: Evidence for rapid post-Flood adaptation. Return to text.
4. John Woodmorappe, Noah’s Ark: A Feasibility Study, Institute for Creation Research, California USA, 1996. Return to text.
5. Paula Weston and Carl Wieland, Bears across the world …, Creation 20(4):28–31, 1998. The rapid climate changes associated with the post-Flood biblical Ice Age would have also created many new and unique environments (see Creation 19(1):42–43, 1997; online article on the Ice Age). Return to text.
6. Note, again, that wherever we observe such adaptation by selection, this culls genetic information, and does not create it. Return to text.
7. La Trobe Bulletin, pp. 7–8, September 1998. Return to text.

Derek C. wrote: “This is an awesome website. As a Christian who’s finally just turning my life over to God (for good), I needed somewhere to look for answers when I had no one to ask.” Help keep the ‘awesome’ going!