Right now, I ought to have feathers on my arms.

Pin feathers, anyhow.

As a boy, I longed for wings--soaring wings, Happing wings, bat-like wings, any kind of wings that would afford deliverance from plodding journeys.

According to the constitution and by-laws of evolution, I ought to have wings.

Do I talk like a fool?

No. I talk like a man who really thinks evolution will work right here and now -- if there is one such.

One of the suppositions that go with the theory of evolution is that there was a time when the reptiles could not get where they were going, fast enough. (I have been in that fix myself.) Now another supposition is that when eyes were needed, "eyes came out to meet the need" and when ears were needed, they came out to hear. The reptiles needed wings; they needed them then and there, but when you want evolution to do anything, you must place your order a million years ahead. Evolution can't be hurried because that would be a miracle too miraculous. It seems that evolution looked the field over and selected a pair of reptiles with a long scale or hair or flap of skin on their legs and mated them up. (!) From the progeny, it chose a pair a wee bit more-so and let them "survive." Always selecting with wings in mind, its "survivors" became pretty birds and because it helped them survive, they layed speckled eggs.

If the Bible contained such folly, how evoluters would mock"!

The snakes that could not get feathers started did not die ; they ate birds. Evolution often feeds its "survivors" to those that have been THEORETICALLY survived. I have been survived a great many times in the same way, because I did not have wings.

You don't understand how a reptile could grow feathers?

It isn't supposed to be understood. It has been spread out over such vast periods of time and the mystery has been so thinned out with gradual changes that it is supposed to soak through the cracks of your mind without being understood.

And yet, a feather is such a delicate, complicated, wonderful structure that one wonders how a feather machine could make itself, set itself up in the right place and push feathers out in exactly the right way. You see, if it got them wrong end to or wrong side out or didn't lap them just right, they would be only trouble makers. You wonder just what a feather was ten years before it was a feather.

I don't know; ask the professor.

What I want to know is, what we have to do to get wings? Probably every normal minded barefooted boy since Cain and Abel has hurt his feet with stones and briers, has wanted wings. Man has from the first been devising ways to get somewhere without walking. He has longed for wings, so much that wings are in his poetry and associated with his heaven. Along with the want-to, there has been dire need. Millions have lost their lives in times of danger, for want of wings. Surely we have met all the conditions. An eminent authority (McCook) says a "17 year locust" (Cicada) grow wings from "buds" in 15 minutes. How do we proceed to get "buds"?

Evolute is an imaginary verb in the past tense. The farther back in the past you assume its magic, the more the mystery fades and the more "scientific" it becomes. Imagine a professor saying to his class, "This frog is beginning to get ready to develop wings," or "This toad has started to com-mence to develop a marsupial pouch," or "I see in this turtle! a drift that indicates turtles will some day nurse their young.''

Some theories must not be pushed too far.

And yet, evolution is a very convincing theory if you wish to believe it and need it as a poultice for sin. Jesus said false prophets would arise with an amazing show of seeming proof. (Matt. 24:24). Did he mean evoluters? Well, it is certain he did not mean people who believe the Bible TOO MUCH. His warning ought to make his people cautious. There is always a contradiction in false doctrine.

My neighbor tells a pig story in four chapters.

(1) He bought a half starved runt of a pig.
(2) He fed it a bucket of slop and it squealed for more.
(3) He fed it a second bucket of slop and it asked for more.
(4) He put the pig in the bucket and the bucket was not nearly full.
I can believe either end of the story by itself.

My neighbor seems to believe all of it because when he tells one part he isn't thinking of the other parts.
It is easy to give mental assent to conflicting ideas, if you keep them so far apart that they do not bump each other. All I ask of students of evolution is to bring its contrary theories into focus at the same time.

There are some sincere souls who think they believe in the Bible and evolution and the more they believe in one, the less they believe in the other. Others think they have effected a working compromise, but the compromise is usually all on one side. I want no harmony that will back the Bible in on a switch to let the circus train go by. I want to bring on a head end collision--in your minds at least. 1 am not unmindful of those students who would like to believe the Bible, but have had evolution-ism dinned into them till their minds follow the beaten path. If such students will try to undo the dinning long enough to consider all that is missing, misapplied or contradictory in the testimony, I have no fears for the Bible. If you have reached the place where you look for contradictions in the Bible and connected truth in evolution, isn't it time to reverse the process in the interest of fair play?

A friend of mine who is an eminent college president has sent me a learned treatise to set me right. The important words in the title are the "TREND of Biology."

What a fitting name!

For the benefit of child readers, let me explain that "trend" means it is leaving the place where it is and going to some place where it isn't. Just like sheep in short pasture. Ever since I can remember, they have been trending.

THE LAW OF EVOLUTIONARY LAWYERS

There are certain laws of life, well known to stock breeders, that the prophets of the bog, by fog or pettifog, harness to their 'ism. Put in simple language, these are VARIATION, HEREDITY, ADJUSTMENT, SELECTION.

Here is a little question for the professor:

WHEN THE FITTEST SURVIVE AND
THE LESS FIT OUTLIVE THEM,
WHICH IS THE "SURVIVINGEST" SURVIVOR?

According to the program, the creature fartherest back in the surviving process is the amoeba. It has been "survived" more than any other form of life on earth, (if this survival law is not foolishness) yet it keeps right on living though numberless "survivors" have become extinct. Its numbers are limited only by infinity.

The entire fabric of evolution depends on the false theory that what they call "higher" and "later" form of life, are better fitted to survive. It takes for granted a presumption that life has evolved for hundreds of millions of years from amoeba to man because each "higher" form was better able to survive than the one beneath it.

What spoils this "bedtime story" is the fact that stubborn "lower" forms persist where the "higher" forms cannot. Is it the truth or a lie, that numberless billions of one celled creatures can be dried up, frozen up, buried in the mud or blown away and come right back and do business?

Ask any school boy who has studied biology.

Of course there is an element of truth in this survival theory. Old mammy toad will leave a thousand eggs in a pool. Averages indicate that only one can live to the second year. Now it is obvious that if one little tadpole can outwit all the foes and get all the food when there is only enough for one, he has quite the best chance to make his mother a grandma.

But, the spryest little fellow may be the one first within reach of a foe. The most cautious one may be the one that goes without its dinner. With death lurking on four sides, above and below, I will pick the average tadpole for the winner. If they were more helpless or stupid a million years ago, it is difficult to understand how any of them lived.

No doubt if black and white rabbits were turned loose to run wild, they would, in time, breed back to a common color that was protective, and that is about all that "survival" can do for them. Some student will say, "Surely, the fastest rabbits will survive and raise the average of speed.'' This seems plausible until you consider that their natural foes use strategy and stealth as much as speed. Speed in a rabbit begets over-confidence and does damage when it makes short turns in the briers.

Now suppose this survival theory could add speed, size, and sagacity, that would not be evolution because the rabbit would still be a rabbit. If "survival" could give the rabbit an equipment like a skunk, that would be evolution for the rabbit, but it would be EVIL-ution for everything else. Imagine, if you can, how soon other life would be driven out. Now evolution has had millions of years (they say) and millions of chance to develop in some creature an equipment that would destroy competitors, but each form of life has enough equipment and not too much. It would take a board of scientists a thousand years to figure out so nice a balance as we sec in nature. Would evolution do that?

It is a vital part of the law of "survival" that no creature can develop an equipment that hinders it or helps its foes.

Is that true, professor?

If the so called "higher" forms of life are so handicapped in the struggle for food and mates and progeny and against fire, frost, famine, flood and foes that "lower" forms are not quickly driven out, then it argues that they were created that way. Never mind what some propagandist says about it; use your common sense. You can see that one bird lays but one egg, another 16. One animal is short on speed, another on wit, another on defense, another on the variety it can eat, another on progeny, so that a wonderful balance is preserved. (Job 39:13-17)

I quite agree with evolutionism that water life appeared first. The Bible says so. We believe it pleased God to create life in the order he did. The evolution-ist must begin as near nothing as possible so that it will minimize the miracle of getting the first life and not overwork the necessity of creation. Having presumed one invisible life, the next thing to presume is that through all the ages nature put a premium on the more complicated forms and gave a bonus of life and progeny to those that developed brain, speed, defense, etc.

That is exactly what evolution would do if evolution were a fact.

THAT IS EXACTLY WHAT HAS NOT BEEN DONE BECAUSE IT IS NOT A FACT.

Every advantage has some corresponding handicap, disproving evolution.

On this proposition I am willing to stake the fight.

Let us begin at the beginning.

There is a greatly magnified picture of a little bag of soup that they say started the trouble. The first figure shows the little ancestor getting ready to have a puckering in its equator. Figure 2 shows the furniture divided and moved, half in each end. Figure 3 shows it broken in two without hurting it. How it could know when to move the furniture or how to move it or where to move it, when it has not brains or nerves, we do not know. Since there must be heredity, variation and survival to get evolution started, will the professor kindly advise us which end gets the heredity and which end survived ? Since each end is the other end of the other end, how are we to get variation started! Since the ones that live now are presumed to be divisions of the first one and stubbornly refuse to evolve, it is difficult to see how any variation could help them.

Why should a creature that can multiply by division and add to its numbers by subtraction, adopt a sex complication that would double the hazard, slow up the process, start a fight among rivals and cumber the settlement with more or less helpless infancy?

Would sex help sexless creatures to resist calamity?

Suppose, just to be generous, we donate sex to evolution, (I do not know any other way it could get it) so that it can get heredity, variation and plenty of fights started.

Now why should a creature that can lay from a hundred to ten million eggs that will hatch themselves, forsake that prolific, care-free method and lay only a few eggs that must be kept warm?

After laying eggs for a hundred million years or so, why should any creature junk the equipment and install the more troublesome system of birth?

Why should creatures that could produce young that could take care of themselves, add to their troubles and help their foes by producing young that needed to be hovered, guarded, and fed?

Perhaps some clever theorist can juggle words and make you believe that the more helpless the young creatures are and the fewer they are, the more there will be of them.

Why should creatures that are equally at home in the water or on land, able to get food or seek safety in either place, limit themselves to the land? Is there any such creature now that could utterly forsake the water and flourish?

Why should creatures having cold blood, requiring comparatively little food, suffering no harm when they freeze solid, adopt hot blood, so they suffer from cold and need more food"?

Why should any creature work an injury to itself, if evolution is supervising the job?

There is only one answer to these questions. The Personal Creator who maintains a balance of life on earth, hangs handicaps on those creatures, that because of superior equipment in other ways, might banish other life.

I do not know what God's plan for the creatures was before "all flesh had corrupted their way upon the earth"; (Gen. 6 :12) (See Is. 11:7.) I only remind you that life as it is. has a distribution of advantage, handicap, and hazard utterly foreign to any blind haphazard drift of evolution.

It must be apparent to all, that to prolong the period of helpless infancy is to multiply the hazard of death before maturity. If evolution has done that, it has made lies out of its own laws. They have tried to escape this by presuming that a prolonged helplessness in infancy insures a longer mature life, but this is not true. The 17 year "locust" has 17 years' infancy and a few days of adult life. The turtle, goose, and many other creatures arc helpless for only a brief period, yet they live to great age.

There is also a handicap in being "educated" past the place where you can believe God and see simple facts.

If an evoluter could visit Mars and find the order of life exactly opposite, so that life seemed to flow from the complex to the simple, he would come back and say, "They have evolution up there also."

This is part two to Puddle of Paradise, written in 1928, by B. H. Shadduck who was better known for his book Jocko-Homo; Heaven Bound, which was highly influencial to the new wave band DEVO (ie - de-evolution).