Cockroaches: Creation’s Cleanup Crew

I just finished reading another well written article from Lita Cosner of Creation Ministries International, and this one was all about one of the least appreciated creeping things on the planet, the cockroach.

In our Creeping Things Live Animal Presentations, we often bring along some Madagascar Hissing Cockroaches. Although many children are drawn to these creatures and actually want to hold them, we find that adults usually head for the hills as soon as we bring them out. So we spend a good deal of time explaining how these fascinating animals fit into God’s creation. We explain that they were brilliantly designed, they serve specific vital purposes in creation (they are decomposers and importnat prey items) and that they can be beneficial to mankind.

Madagascar Hissing Cockroach at the Creation & Earth History Museum in Santee, CA
Madagascar Hissing Cockroach 

Additionally it is important to note that these creatures are perfect examples of the false idea of evolutionary stasis over millions of year. That is to say, cockroaches did not evolve! This is a very important point that CMI drives home in this Creation.com article.

Cockroaches first appear in ‘Carboniferous’ layers, supposedly 350 million years ago. But the only difference between cockroaches then and now is that they had external ovipositors. “In other words, they are practically identical.” But even today there are small differences between species of cockroaches; some carry their ootheca (egg capsule) internally until the baby cockroaches hatch, while others deposit the ootheca in a safe location. Evolutionists would explain this by saying that the cockroach was so spectacularly adapted to a range of environments that it didn’t need to change. But how did the cockroach get so adapted in the first place? We don’t see developing cockroaches; we see cockroaches that look virtually identical to living cockroaches today all throughout the fossil record. It’s inconceivable that a creature that is supposed to have predated the dinosaurs in the evolutionary timeframe would stay exactly the same while everything else changed around it.

But cockroaches are also cited as evidence of extremely rapid evolution. Pesticides for cockroaches used to be sweet, but cockroach populations developed an aversion to sweet-tasting foods, thus avoiding the poisons. This is said to be fast-paced evolution, but is it really? In fact, probably some cockroaches in all populations had this distaste for sugar, so those were the ones that survived the sweet poisons. It only takes a few cockroaches to rebuild a colony of thousands, and all the descendants would then be the sweet-avoiding kind. It’s fast-paced natural selection, but it’s not evolution. It’s not clear that these roaches would even have a survival advantage in places without poison, because their distaste for sweets eliminates some possible food sources.”

Well said CMI!

See the full article herehttp://creation.com/cockroach

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