Predators, Prey, Plants And, Evolution

According to evolutionary theory, plants were the first form of life that arose on earth. Moving cells than formed which lived on plants and later became animals. Different types of animals evolved from those which fed, not on plants, but on other animals and became the predators of today.

The trouble is that this scenario is full of gaping holes. To be predators such as lions, leopards, cheetahs, tigers, jaguars, wolves, sharks, eagles, hawks and, so on, requires these creatures to have far greater abilities than the plant-eaters that they feed on. Their prey includes deer, zebra, antelope, gazelles, rabbits, mice, etc.

If the predators are to catch the prey that they need to survive, they must have superior intelligence, eyesight and, hearing. They will require special teeth, claws and, digestive systems. Since virtually every meal means a chase and a battle, predators must be as tough as nails without being too big.

The question here is why did predators go through all of the evolutionary trouble to change from plant-eaters (herbivores) to meat-eaters (carnivores) if they are no more suited to survival in the environment? If predators depend on herbivores for food, then they can be no more likely to survive. If the prey disappears, then the predators will starve.

All the prey that I have described above have to due to survive is to walk around and eat the abundant plant life. The predators, in contrast, always have to hunt successfully. And if anything should decimate the ranks of the prey, then the predators are gone too.

The whole idea in evolutionary theory is to survive long enough to pass along the genes. Those creatures that happen to have advantages making them more likely to survive long enough to reproduce will be the ones that pass along their genes. In time, as the theory goes, new species emerge from old ones and are better suited to survival.

So why then, if the more complex and supposedly highly evolved predators cannot be considered as more likely to survive than the plant-eaters from which they supposedly evolved, do carnivorous predators exist at all? This cannot be considered as an evolutionary fluke because the carnivorous predator-herbivore prey relationship is very widespread and exits in ecosystems all across the world. According to evolution, for one species to evolve into another over time, the new species must have gained abilities making it more likely to survive and pass along it's genes.

Suppose there was a system of promotions throughout life. In life at the first level, you are told that you will really have to be vigilant and use your wits to get the food that you need to survive. You will have to chase and fight for your meals and will have no guarantee that you will get them. After a while, you are promoted to the second level of life. All of the struggling is left behind. You are given all that you require and only have to take it, while using reasonable caution for your safety. Finally you are promoted to the third, and highest, level of life. At this level, you do not even have to seek your basic needs. All you have to do is lie out in the sun and everything you could possibly need is brought to you.

These three levels of life getting progressively easier as we go upward is actually a model of life on earth. Except that it is just the opposite that evolutionary theory tells us it should be. In that theory, survival and existence should get more certain and secure as living things evolve. It does not make any evolutionary sense to change into a new species unless that species has more certainty of survival.

But in our tertiary model of life here, the lowest level represents the meat-eating predators who must continuously hunt for their next meal. The second level represents the herbivores, the plant-eating prey upon which the predators feed. The highest and most secure third level of life is actually the plants.

You see, reality is actually the reverse of evolution. Just because one form of life uses another for food does not mean it's survival is more certain and when the prey is gone, the predators will starve. There is one factor that could turn everything around and make the evolution from prey to predator make sense. However, that factor is missing. I am referring to omnivores, creatures that can digest both meat and vegetation. If predators evolved from plant-eating prey, the expansion of their dietary range to include meat as well as plants would increase their chances of surviving long enough to reproduce and the whole thing would make evolutionary sense.

Unfortunately for evolutionary theory, it doesn't. All of the predators that I named above all have one thing in common. They can digest only meat and cannot live on plants. For a species to be omnivorous like humans, to be able to live on both plants and meat, is a relatively simple biological development. One of the most logical ways to ensure that a species will have enough food is to widen it's dietary range, particularly including grass because of it's abundance.

So why, if predators evolved from plant-eaters, did they lose their ability to digest plants while going through all of the evolutionary trouble to gain the abilities they would need to successfully hunt plant-eaters and finally ending up no better off than the herbivores because they are dependent on them for survival?

Come on, this makes no sense whatsoever. A tiger is supposedly one of the most highly evolved of animals, evolving from earlier animals that ate plants. So why did the tiger give up the ability to digest plants so it can spend it's life trying to outwit animals that still eat plants just so it can survive. All the while, it is sorrounded by luxuriant plant growth that it's ancestors could digest but it is now unable to. We cannot say that it is because meat is far superior to a diet of plants because the largest animals on earth are herbivores. And since the flesh of herbivores are made of the atoms in plants, there are no atoms in meat that are not also in plants.

This plant-prey-predator design in the food chain throughout the world does not make sense from an evolutionary point of view but does serve the purpose of keeping the atoms involved in biology, particularly carbon, in circulation. There is a division of labor (labour) in the environment that shows it was planned as a whole and could not have just evolved. Herbivores keep the limited number of bioatoms on earth from becoming concentrated in a few fast-growing species of plants. Predators counterbalance this by acting to preserve plants by limiting the numbers of rapidly-producing herbivores. It all keeps the ecosystem in balance. If not for predators, the numbers of plant-eaters would multiply uncontrollably until they consumed all of the plants and then they would starve.

Suppose we have an island with three forms of life; grass, rabbits and, wolves. The rabbits eat the grass and the wolves eat the rabbits. The wolves cannot be considered as having a greater chance of survival than the rabbits, which is what counts in evolution, because if the rabbits disappear, the wolves will starve.

However, the wolves have a vital role to play in the ecosystem because if they were not there to limit the numbers of the rabbits, they would eat all of the grass and then starve. The wolves preserve the environment by keeping a limit on the number of rabbits but it is vital that the wolves not be able to digest grass themselves. This shows that while it makes not a bit of sense for wolves to evolve from rabbits, God created predators that can digest only flesh to preserve the environment. Many rabbits are killed by the wolves but not as many as would starve without the wolves.

What about wood? It contains a lot of energy, which is why it is burned for fuel. But if animals could eat wood, it would put nature out of business. Another element of God's design is that almost all herbivores only eat those portions of plants that will grow back and so will not kill the plant. It is only a few insects like termites and carpenter ants that can feed on wood.

But this leaves us with another problem. Large plants require strong stems to stand straight up and resist being eaten by herbivores but then what happens when the plant dies. Wood is slow to decay and this threatens in itself to horde bioatoms as dead woody underbrush piles up. If the dead wood is buried before it can decay, the bioatoms could be lost to the biosphere forever.

This is why God created lightning. Life as we know it is dependent on the periodic fires ignited by lightning because this is what burns off the dead underbrush that is slow to decay and returns the atoms to the biosphere. Moderate fires every few years have been a part of nature for millions of years. The reason that there are such devastating wildfires today is that we keep putting out every fire that comes along so that dead underbrush keeps piling up for decades. Bioatoms, such as carbon, escape as smoke and return to the biosphere and the atoms in the ash that remains is washed back into circulation by rain.

I simply do not see how a thinking person can believe that our ecosystem came about by random evolution instead of being created by God. I agree that species have the ability to become better suited to the environment over time, this is why Eskimos are short and stocky to conserve heat. But the idea that there is no God is ridiculous.