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Creation 26(4):56, September 2004

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Editor’s note: As Creation magazine has been continuously published since 1978, we are publishing some of the articles from the archives for historical interest, such as this. For teaching and sharing purposes, readers are advised to supplement these historic articles with more up-to-date ones available by searching creation.com.

A cat with four ears (not nine lives)

by Don Batten

A kitten born on a farm in Germany has an extra pair of ears!1 ‘Lilly’ is perfectly healthy. The extra ears do not hear; only her usual ears, and they hear quite normally.

Animals, and even humans, can be born with extra toes/fingers/ears, and so on. Evolutionists sometimes use these extra bits, such as an extra pair of wings on a fruit fly, to claim that genetic information has increased spontaneously; that is, without an intelligent Creator.2 As a propaganda tool, this does confuse some people.

However, no new genetic information is involved with making these extras. The cat already has the information for making ears, and the fruit fly already has information for making wings. An error during development has merely caused the information to activate twice instead of once!

Lilly’s extra ears most likely came about because of a defect during development, rather than inheriting a defective gene from a parent.

If you used a photocopier to make a copy of a document and it malfunctioned and printed two copies, you would not conclude that you had created new information by this accident. It is like this with the extra organs that sometimes appear on animals (and plants). There is no new information created, so it has nothing to do with evolution!

Lilly’s extra ears most likely came about because of a defect during development, rather than inheriting a defective gene from a parent. Chemicals in the environment can cause such defects. Everyone knows about how thalidomide caused many abnormalities in human babies—usually loss of limbs due to suppression of the information for making limbs, for example. Radiation can also cause defects, or they can be spontaneous.

In Lilly, the defect resulted in the expression of the ear-design information twice, resulting in two pairs of ears. However, not all the information activated twice, because apparently only the external parts of the extra ears are present, since the ears do not hear.

We live in a fallen world, and such defects are part and parcel of the fact that God has withdrawn some of His sustaining power from His creation. They have nothing to do with evolution.

References and notes

  1. Four-eared kitten ‘not a monster’, ABC News Online, abc.net.au, accessed March 2004. Return to text.
  2. For example, the Public Broadcasting Service’s (PBS) Evolution series in the USA, first broadcast in 2001. See Sarfati, J., Refuting Evolution 2, Creation Ministries International, Brisbane, Australia,  chapter 5, 2002. Return to text.