Cuddly cold-cures counter critics
by Carl Wieland
Published: 13 September 2006 (GMT+10)
Photo by Guillaume Blanchard
Opponents of biblical creation have often used the koala as an example of an animal
whose diet, they say, is too specialized for it to have been able to migrate from
Ararat to south-eastern Australia.
They point out that koalas would have had to migrate across vast tracts of land
that contain no eucalyptus (gum) trees. Koalas live exclusively on a diet of such
leaves, so they could not survive the journey.
The response to such criticisms has centred around two factors, but now there is
additional important information strengthening the creationist answer.
First, the two existing points:
- Vegetation in an area can change very rapidly as weather conditions do. After the
Flood and the associated glacial/pluvial age, there would have been massive shifts
in rainfall patterns for hundreds of years.1,2 There is no way of knowing
for sure which trees grew where in the early post-Flood centuries, but there have
been great changes. For instance, there is evidence that huge forests once covered
areas which are now dry and barren. Thus there may have been eucalyptus trees growing
all along the route of migration.
- The koala’s ancestor was probably far less specialized than the more ‘devolved’
modern-day variety. An analogy would be the way in which modern-day breeds of pet
animals often require far more finicky conditions than their hardier ‘wild
type’ ancestors. Specialization under selection pressure involves daughter
populations which carry only a portion of the information of the parent populations.
Just because today’s koalas only live on gum leaves doesn’t mean that
their ancestors didn’t enjoy a much broader range of food.
In addition:
- It now looks as if the koala’s well-known exclusive diet of gum leaves is
really a behavioral addiction, rather than a genetic inability to eat or digest
other types of food.
… intoxicating substances … the baby koala literally becomes ‘hooked’
through its mother’s eucalyptus-flavoured milk.
It certainly seems true that koalas reared in the wild feed exclusively on eucalyptus
leaves and die without them. Their bodies become literally saturated with the pungent
eucalyptus oils until they smell like furry cough sweets.3
But according to Roland Siegel, a psychopharmacologist at UCLA, this dependence
on these intoxicating substances is learnt in early infancy; the baby koala literally
becomes ‘hooked’ through its mother’s eucalyptus-flavoured milk.
Yet orphan koalas reared away from any contact with these substances ‘can
thrive on a diet of cow’s milk, bread and honey.’4
Koalas may have only become addicted to an exclusive gum-leaf diet in this way well
after arriving in Australia.
Related articles
References
- Oard, M., An Ice Age Caused by the Genesis Flood, Technical Monograph,
Institute for Creation Research, San Diego, California, 1990.
- Austin, S. A., Baumgardner, J. R., Humphreys, D. R., Snelling, A. A., Vardiman,
L. and Wise, K. P., Catastrophic plate tectonics: a global Flood model of earth
history. Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Creationism,
Creation Science Fellowship, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, 1994.
- Spinney, L., Animals seeking oblivion, New Scientist 143(1945):29,
1994.
- Spinney, Ref 3.
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