A Soldier of God


Proof of Intelligent Design 
God's Engineering of the Dragonfly
Some of the greatest aeronautical engineering has yet to be discovered. Here's an amazing flying machine in nature.


TO LEARN MORE ABOUT TOMORROW'S FLYING MACHINES scientists are studying a safe, successful and proven aeronautical design that's been around for a long time -- the dragonfly. Engineers at Boeing Company in Seattle, researchers at the University of Colorado and others have investigated the dragonfly's graceful flying maneuvers.

For its small size the dragonfly can fly an incredible 60 miles per hour. It can dart quickly from side to side, fly backwards and stop instantly in midair. It can lift 15 times its own weight. Such feats are not yet possible with human aircraft. How is it possible with the dragonfly?

Curious researchers visited swamps and captured dragonflies to find out.

One reason they chose to study the dragonfly is because it's a comparatively simple flying creature. It doesn't change the shape of its body or wings when flying, taking off or gliding like a bird does. For example, a hummingbird's wings change shape continually during each stroke. In addition, its feathers pop up or stay down at various periods throughout each cycle. Scientists would like to know more about the hummingbird's flight, but it's just too difficult to reproduce.  Study the Hummingbird too.  It is another proven Design

The dragonfly's life

Dragonflies, looking neither like dragons nor flies, resemble little airplanes. This insect has been mystically nicknamed "snake doctor," "snake feeder," "devil's darning needle" and "horse stinger." The only accurate nickname is the "mosquito hawk." With its claws it captures mosquitoes in the air and devours them in flight. In half an hour it can eat the equivalent of its own weight.

METAMORPHOSIS OF THE DRAGONFLY

Just keep in mind that the Evolutionist want to make you believe this all just happened to happen???

 Life starts under water when they hatch from eggs.

Female dragonflies do not mate again after fertilization. However, this does not create any problem for the males of the Calopteryx Virgo species. By using the hooks on its tail, the male captures the female by the neck. The female wraps her legs around the tail of the male. The male, by using special extensions on its tail, cleans any possible sperm left from another male. Then, he injects his sperm into the female's reproductive cavity. Since this process takes hours, they sometimes fly in this clenched position. The dragonfly leaves the mature eggs in the shallows of a lake or a pool. Once the nymph hatches from the egg, it lives in water for three to four years. During this time, it also feeds in water. For this reason, it was created with a body capable of swimming fast enough to catch a fish and jaws powerful enough to dismember a prey. As the nymph grows, the skin wrapping its body tightens. It sheds this skin at four different times. When it is time for the final change, it leaves the water and starts climbing a tall plant or a rock . It climbs until its legs give in. Then, it secures itself by help of clamps at the tips of its feet. One slip and a fall means death at that point.

This last phase differs from the previous four in that God moulds the nymph into a flying creature through a wonderful transformation.

The back of the nymph cracks first. The crack widens and becomes an open slot through which a new creature, totally different from the preceding, struggles to get out. This extremely fragile body is secured with ties that stretch from the previous creature. These ties are created to have ideal transparency and flexibility. Otherwise they would break and not be able to carry it, which could mean that the larva could fall into the water and perish.

In addition, there are a series of special mechanisms that help the dragonfly to shed its skin. The body of the dragonfly shrinks and becomes wrinkled in the old body. In order to "open" this body, a special pump system and a special body fluid are created to be used in this process. These wrinkled body parts of the insect are inflated by pumping body fluid after getting out through the slot. In the meantime, chemical solvents start to break the ties of the new legs with the old ones without damage. This process takes place perfectly even though it would be devastating if only one of the legs were stuck. The legs are left to dry and harden for about twenty minutes before any testing.

The wings are fully developed already but are in a folded position. The body fluid is pumped by firm contractions of the body into the wing tissues. The wings are left drying after stretching.

After it leaves the old body and dries out completely, the dragonfly tests all the legs and wings. The legs are folded and stretched one by one and wings are raised and lowered.

Finally, the insect attains the form designed for flight. It is very hard for anyone to believe that this perfectly flying creature is the same as the caterpillar-like creature that left the water. The dragonfly pumps the excess fluids out, to balance the system. The metamorphosis is complete and the insect is ready to fly.

One faces the impossibility of the claims of evolution again when one tries by reasoning to find the origin of this miraculous transformation. The theory of evolution claims that all creatures came about through random changes. However, the metamorphosis of the dragonfly is an extremely intricate process that leaves no room for even a small error in any phase. The slightest obstacle in any one of these phases would cause metamorphosis to be incomplete resulting in the injury or death of dragonfly. Metamorphosis is truly an "irreducibly complex" cycle and therefore is an explicit proof of design.

In short, the metamorphosis of dragonfly is one of the countless evidences of how flawlessly God creates living things. The wonderful art of God manifests itself even in an insect.

While flying dragonflies spend most of their time cruising up and down streams and along the shores of lakes and ponds in search of prey. With their extra-large spherical eyes that cover half their head they can see everything around them at once. They can spot a motionless mosquito six meters away, a flying one at an even greater distance.

How it flies

The dragonfly's method of flying is completely different from the smooth flight of airplanes and soaring or gliding of birds. It's a mode called "unsteady aerodynamics" which means there is constant turbulence around the wing.

The front pair of wings churns up a small vortex of rapidly whirling air. Meanwhile, the back pair of wings, which may be down when the front wings are up (or vice versa), captures the extra energy from this turbulence. This produces extraordinary lift as the air flows much faster over the top of the dragonfly's rear wing than along the wing's lower surface. By changing the tilt and speed of its wings and varying the timing between them, the dragonfly performs its graceful acrobatics.

What's intriguing about air turbulence is that in man's flying machines, both fixed-wing and helicopters, these gyrating air currents are usually harmful and can be deadly. Helicopter blades weaken because each whirling blade runs into the turbulent path of the preceding blade. Resultant vibrations eventually weaken the metal. Many planes have crashed due to turbulence. But, the dragonfly actually produces precise, predictable turbulence and uses it to its advantage.

The dragonfly’s marvelous ability to dart sideways, upwards, hover, and instantly change direction, is due to impressive design features. The creature has two sets of many-veined, long, rigid wings which beat alternately. (When one set is up, the other is down.) This gives it excellent aerodynamic efficiency, and the independent operation of each wing provides precise flight control. The wings beat 1,600 or more times a minute.

Not surprisingly, the muscles which operate a dragonfly’s wings comprise about one-quarter of its total weight. These powerful synchronized wings can propel the insect at speeds estimated at 50 kilometers an hour (30 miles per hour) or more, sometimes for long distances. Dragonflies have been known to migrate more than 300 kilometers across water.
Just as amazing as the dragonfly’s flying ability are its two large eyes. Though these may make the insect a little scary to look at, they are a marvel of intricate design by the Creator.

The surface of each eyeball is faceted with up to 30,000 individual ‘eyes’ called ommatidia. Each of these units combines a surface lens with an internal cone-shaped crystalline lens and scans a narrow field of view. These scanners simultaneously feed data into the brain of the insect, thus giving the dragonfly multi-image vision and super-sensitive motion detection. Moving objects pass from the view of one lens to another.

The dragonfly’s ability to rotate its head gives the insect almost 360-degree vision. It can see moving objects up to 40 meters (44 yards) away—a long distance for such a small creature.  During its aquatic early life as a nymph, the dragonfly has the ability to use water drawn into its gills as a form of jet propulsion if alarmed. Water used for breathing can be expelled in a jet which drives the nymph forward, rocket-style, for several inches.

Later in its life the insect goes through a remarkable transformation from a water-breathing creature (with gills) into the beautifully colored air-breathing dragonfly with which we are familiar. If it were held under water in the adult stage it would drown.
On the evolutionists’ time-scale, dragonflies first appear in the fossil record in the Carboniferous Period (‘300 million years ago’), before flowering plants or dinosaurs. By evolutionists’ own admission, dragonflies have not changed much in that ‘long time’.

Reduced size today

In fact, the only significant change today seems to be their reduced size. Some fossil dragonflies have a wingspan measuring up to 70 centimeters (28 inches). Today the largest is about 19 centimeters (7½ inches) and many are considerably smaller.
Evolutionists are somewhat puzzled that dragonflies could have survived unchanged for 300 million years. One writes: ‘Dragonflies have evolved without much alteration during this enormous period of time—a triumph of evolutionary conservatism in a world where change is usually synonymous with survival. Not only is their unchanged survival a problem for the evolution model, but evolution is believed to proceed from simple forms of life to complex forms of life over millions of years. Yet we see remarkable complexity in the dragonfly, which appears fully formed ‘300 million years’ ago by the estimation of those who believe in evolution.

For a young-earth (under 10,000 years) creationist, none of these facts is a problem. Genesis chapter one tells us that God created all living creatures to reproduce according to their ‘kind’. We often see variation within a kind, as in the case of the dragonfly. But of the 5,000 dragonfly species known today, all are clearly dragonflies, and the fossil record testifies to the fact of ‘no dragon-fly evolution’.  Some fossil dragonflies are very large, but only their smaller descendants exist in our present time.
The dragonfly is yet another example of how the facts fit the creation record of Genesis better than they fit the theory of evolution. Their marvelous design clearly points to the Creator.  The closer we look at creation, the more evident God's reality should become. 

By inspecting the perfect construction of the dragonfly, which is much more advanced than anything man has yet developed, our attention should be directed to the greatest Aeronautical Engineer of all -- the Creator God. If you came across a sleek Boeing 777 jet and stepped inside its sophisticated cockpit, you would never reason that the aircraft just developed on its own; that there was no designer and builder.

The closer we look at creation, the more evident God's reality should become. In Romans 1:20 we read, "...His invisible attributes are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made." (So how could anyone believe that the dragonfly achieved its design by evolution?  The dragonfly's design is perfect. Every flaw has been engineered out. If it weren't, the little creature simply could not fly. Incidentally, dragonflies have to fly to reproduce. They mate only in midair!

What God has created is mysterious and sometimes baffles human understanding. "It is the glory of God to conceal a matter, but the glory of kings is to search out a matter" (Proverbs 25:2). It is for man to uncover and learn from these mysteries.

When scientists began studying dragonflies, they discovered designs even more complex and advanced than what they expected. Dragonflies are amazing, but greater than dragonflies is the Designer and Creator of dragonflies. Our God is an awesome God. He deserves our worship.

Copyright . Noel Wideberg. All rights reserved.
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