The secret to what makes colours pop on dazzling songbirds

 

Image courtesy of Daniel Field

Joel Kontinen

Why are songbirds so colorful?

Hidden layers of colour in the plumage of tanagers and some other songbirds explain what makes them so eye-catching.

Brightly coloured songbirds called tanagers are so eye-catching because they have a hidden layer of black or white beneath their dazzling plumage.

Painters often prime a canvas with a layer of white to enhance the colours they will eventually layer on, as well as to make it smoother and stronger. But it seems this is a mechanism that birds were using long before humans picked up paintbrushes.

Rosalyn Price-Waldman at Princeton University and her colleagues have found that when songbirds in the tanager genus Tangara have bright red or yellow plumage, they usually have white layers hidden underneath. When they have blue plumage, they have black layers beneath.

To investigate why, they removed 72 feathers from taxidermied tanager specimens in the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County’s collection.

By taking pictures of the feathers on different backgrounds, the team measured how their reflectance or absorption of light changed, finding that the underlayers make the top layers look more colourful.

Source: 

Chris Simms 2025 The secret to what makes colours pop on dazzling songbirds | New Scientist 23 July

 

Beautiful Australian Bees

Image courtesy of James Dorey, Flinders University, fair use doctrine.




Joel Kontinen

He has made everything beautiful in its time . This is what the book of Ecclesiastes 3.11 says what God has made. the bees of Australia are a site to be honoured for.

The evolution of the bees is clouded in mystery.


Source:

Saplakoglu,Yasemin. 2020.Gorgeous images of Australian 'rainbow' bees will blow your mind. Live Science, 14 July.

Fisherman Reels in A Dinosaur-Like Fish With Huge Eyes

Oscar Lundalh with the fish we got. image courtesy of BNPS, Fair use doctrine.




Joel Kontinen

An angler had big surprise for reeling in a fish that looked like a dinosaur. It looked weird and it had huge eyes.

The 19.year old man, Oscar Lundalh, was hoping to get halibut, but he got this ratfish instead in north Norway.

He almost left his vessel when he saw the fish that he had reeled in for half an hour, but the fish did not survive. He took it home to eat it, saying that it tasked a lot like cod.

This fish shows that today's fishes can be quite extraordinary. The one who made them knew what he was doing, even below the surface.

Source:

Fisherman gets shock as he reels in 'dinosaur-like' fish with huge eyes.2019. Sky News (15 September).

A Creature Called a 'Balloon on a String' Living In The Depths of The Indian Ocean

Image courtesy of Five Deeps Expedition.




Joel Kontinen

Our world is full of wonders. The deep sea is a place for most of them.

The Five Deeps Expedition caught picture of a gelatinous creature a in a recent dive to “the Java Trench, the bottommost part of the Indian Ocean.”

It is probably a new creature, as there are no creatures such as this, as it was living over 6,500 meters (21,300 feet) below sea level.

They call it a balloon on a string, and it is most probably a jellyfish.

"This creature likely anchors itself to the seafloor with its long tentacle, perhaps to keep still in a seismically active seafloor, Alan Jamieson, the chief scientist on the expedition and a senior lecturer at Newcastle University said. As for why the tentacle is so long, Jamieson suggested it might help the creature filter feed up to 3.3 feet (1 meter) above the seafloor."

The Okeanos Explorer’s recent expeditions in the central Pacific have also identified deep sea creatures, for instance a creature, called a sea toad or coffinfish (Chaunacops), was bright red.

And then, ghost octopus, and a and a jellyfish the incredible deep sea creatures.

Louis Armstrong recorded the song What a Wonderful World in 1967, and it now seems that the world is even more wonderful than we could have imagined.

As the Old Testament book of Ecclesiastes puts it, “He has made everything beautiful in its time” (3:11, NIV).


Source:

Saplakoglu, Yasemin. 2019, A Living 'Balloon on a String' Discovered in the Deepest Part of the Indian Ocean. Live Science (18 April).

Beauty – a Creation Concept that Darwin Cannot Imagine

A flame bowerbird. Image courtesy of Richard Bowdler Sharpe, public domain.


In a Darwin only view of birds, Ferrish Jahr speaks about a thing that has surpassed evolutionists since Darwin.

A male flame bowerbird is a creature of incandescent beauty. The hue of his plumage transitions seamlessly from molten red to sunshine yellow. But that radiance is not enough to attract a mate. When males of most bowerbird species are ready to begin courting, they set about building the structure for which they are named: an assemblage of twigs shaped into a spire, corridor or hut.”

He takes this trip with Richard Prum, an evolutionary ornithologist at Yale University and to a lesser extend with Michael Ryan:

"Ryan is particularly interested in the innate sensitivities and biases of our neural architecture: He describes how our visual system, for example, may be wired to notice symmetry. Prum stresses his conviction that in humans, as in birds, many types of physical beauty and sexual desire have arbitrarily co-evolved without reference to health or fertility.”

Them he makes this concession:

“Why are flowers beautiful? Or, more precisely: Why are flowers beautiful to us? The more I thought about this question, the more it seemed to speak to the nature of beauty itself.”


Source:

Jabr, Ferris, 2019. How Beauty Is Making Scientists Rethink Evolution. The New York Times (9 January).

A Blue Dragon Fish Doesn’t Look Like a Fish

Image courtesy of Sylke Rohrlach, CC BY-SA 2.0.



Joel Kontinen

The deep sea is full of wonders. (See examples here and here.)

It looks like an eel,(which is a living fossil), but it isn’t. The blue dragon fish is small, weighing circa 2–50 cm (0.8 –20 inches).

They don’t like the surf; they usually are found at a dept of 1,500 metres in the Pacific, Atlantic, and Indian oceans. they visualise their prey with the help of glowing barbels.

A Barbel ”is a slender, whiskerlike sensory organ near the mouth.” It known to migrate vertically whilst capturing its prey.

Everything the Lord made beautiful.

Source:

Dragon Fish Facts no date Dragon Fish Diet & Habitat.

Fractals in Nature Defy Darwinian Assumptions

Baobabs, like other trees, follow a sophisticated mathematical formula. Image courtesy of Fox-Talbot, CC BY-SA 3.0.




Joel Kontinen

In his book River Out of Eden, Richard Dawkins wrote: "The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good.”

But is this really so?

It is practically impossible to ignore the fine tuning that we see all around us, from the minuscule to the really huge.

It comes in many forms, for instance in Fibonacci numbers and fractals.

Polish mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot (1924–2010) coined the term fractal in 1975.

Geometric shapes known as Mandelbrot sets are everywhere in nature, and what is special about them is that many of them repeat themselves on a smaller scale, and then even smaller, often producing a soothing effect.

This does not look like the cold, callous Darwinian world. The real world is full of beauty, regardless of where we look.

Sources:

Dawkins, Richard. 1999.River Out of Eden. London: Phoenix.

Lisle, Jason. 2007. Fractals: Hidden Beauty Revealed in Mathematics. Answers 2 (1), 52–55.

Tiny “Alien” Fish Is Evidence for Diversity in Creation

Lubricogobius exiguus. Image courtesy of Izuzuki, CC BY-SA 2.5.



Joel Kontinen

The yellow pygmy goby (Lubricogobius exiguus) is tiny. Measuring 2 centimetres and sporting almost hypnotic emerald eyes, it could well be an alien.

But it isn’t. It lives in the Pacific Ocean and is evidence for the wonderful diversity in God’s creation in which we often see great beauty – even below the surface.

Source:

Le Page, Michael. 2018. The hypnotic face and emerald eyes of the yellow pygmy goby. New Scientist (27 March).

Beauty and Patterns In the Universe Speak of Creation

Image courtesy of NASA.




Joel Kontinen

The Milky Way and our galactic neighbourhood are anything but haphazard collections of stars. Instead, stars and galaxies seem to follow a clear pattern, which, seen from a naturalistic viewpoint, is a big mystery:

“Stars are formed in a variety of masses, and that distribution follows a well-known relation that’s observed everywhere we look, which is kind of odd and we’re not exactly sure why stars follow that relation,” New Scientist quotes Don Figer at the Rochester Institute of Technology in New York as saying.

Symmetry means beauty. Fibonacci numbers can be seen practically everywhere in the universe, making it an astoundingly beautiful place.

Beauty would be an enormous dilemma in a cold, heartless Darwinian world, but in a created cosmos it is the very thing that we would expect to find, as God is the author of all beauty.

Source:

Crane, Leah. 2018. The universe could be full of more huge stars than we thought. New Scientist (4 January).

Amazingly Beautiful Deep-Sea Toad Defies Darwinian Expectations

Sea toad or coffinfish (Chaunacops). Image courtesy of the NOAA Office of Ocean Exploration and Research, Deep-Sea Symphony: Exploring the Musicians Seamounts




Joel Kontinen

In September 2017, during one of Okeanos Explorer’s recent expeditions in the central Pacific, its remotely operated vehicle (ROV) spotted and filmed an unusual creature at a depth of 3,148 meters (1.96 miles).

The creature, identified as a sea toad or coffinfish (Chaunacops), was bright red.

For evolutionists, beauty in places where practically no one can see it, is bound to be a huge mystery in a world that ought to be be indifferent to everything that looks like it was made by a superb artist.

Natural selection can hardly explain it, and it fares even worse for sexual selection.

Beauty in all kinds of places and creatures is exactly that what we would expect to find in a created world:

“He [God ]has made everything beautiful in its time” (Ecclesiastes 3:11, New International Version).

Recent NOAA expeditions have filmed many other deep-sea creatures that are astoundingly beautiful. (See, for instance, here, here, here and here.)

Source:

Mundy, Bruce. 2017. The Mysterious Identity of the Bright-Red Sea Toad. Okeanos Explorer, NOAA (12 September).

Wonders of Creation: Almost a Magic Forest Deep Below the Surface

An Anthomastus mushroom coral (centre) with some other animals. Image courtesy of the NOAA Office of Ocean Exploration and Research, Mountains in the Deep: Exploring the Central Pacific Basin.




Joel Kontinen

The wet world deep below the ocean surface is anything but dull.

Recent discoveries made by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) ship Okeanos Explorer and its remotely operated vehicle Deep Discoverer has shown the incredible variety – and beauty – of deep sea animals and plants.

A recent dive discovered a mushroom coral that thrives at 2, 240 metres (7,350 feet) below the ocean surface in an environment that looks like a magic forest.

NOOA’s expeditions have shown us how incredibly beautiful deep sea life can be (see here, here, here, here and here).

They testify of the Creator, who made everything beautiful.

Source:

NOAA. 2017. NOAA Ship Okeanos Explorer: Dive 03: "Te Kawhiti o Maui Potiki” (2 May).

Fractals: Complex, Soothing Beauty in Nature

Fractals are seen in fern leaves.




Joel Kontinen

First, we see an overall pattern. Then, when we take a closer look, we see that the very same pattern is repeated at a smaller scale, and then on an even smaller one.

These patterns are called fractals and they occur everywhere in nature, from fern leaves to the branches of a tree, snowflakes, ocean waves, animal colouration patterns and even Saturn’s rings.

Writing in The Conversation, University of Oregon physics professor Richard Taylor describes this phenomenon:

“My scientific curiosity was stirred when I learned that many of nature's objects are fractal, featuring patterns that repeat at increasingly fine magnifications. For example, think of a tree. First you see the big branches growing out of the trunk. Then you see smaller versions growing out of each big branch. As you keep zooming in, finer and finer branches appear, all the way down to the smallest twigs. Other examples of nature's fractals include clouds, rivers, coastlines and mountains.”

Fractals are often seen in tree branches. Image courtesy of Ronan, Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0).

The great beauty we see everywhere in nature, for instance in the form of fractals, the golden ratio or Fibonacci numbers, challenges naturalistic thinking.

Even in a world that is groaning from the consequences of the Fall, we see amazing beauty in all kinds of everything, from giant galaxies to deep sea creatures.

Source:

Taylor, Richard. 2017. Fractal patterns in nature and art are aesthetically pleasing and stress-reducing. The Conversation (31 March).

Brambles Defy Naturalistic Expectations: They Can Crawl

Some brambles like to move. Image courtesy of Anthony Appleyard, public domain.



Joel Kontinen

Flowers and other plants do not fit in well with Darwinian expectations.

Charles Darwin was puzzled by the lack of evidence for the evolution of angiosperms or flowering plants.

The earliest flowers look more or less like today’s flowers.

And plants defy Darwinian thinking in other ways as well. They communicate with other plants. Trees sleep.

Some plants thrive in almost impossible conditions. Some use a clever trick to avoid being eaten. Some use colour to get more energy from the sun.

Recently, BBC Earth introduced yet another feature that makes plants special: brambles can crawl up to 7,5 centimetres (3 inches) a day.

It's their branches that move. Obviously, their roots have to stay where they are.

It seems that even thorny plants that remind us of the Fall described in Genesis 3 defy Darwinian expectations by doing the seemingly impossible.

Source:

BBC Earth. 2017. Time-lapse footage reveals a bramble ‘crawling’(14 March).

Incredibly Beautiful Deep Sea Creatures Defy Darwinism

Yellow zoanthids. Image courtesy of the NOAA Office of Ocean Exploration and Research, 2017 American Samoa.





Joel Kontinen

“Stunningly beautiful” might not sound very scientific but it is an authentic and accurate description of one of the deep-sea creatures NOAA’s recent expeditions have filmed.

We might think that the watery world several kilometres below the surface would be dull and grey, but it is not.

It appears to be a big Darwinian dilemma.

The creatures, including octopus, jellyfish, sea butterflies and others, are astoundingly beautiful.

Louis Armstrong recorded the song What a Wonderful World in 1967, and it now seems that the world is even more wonderful than we could have imagined.

As the Old Testament book of Ecclesiastes puts it, “He has made everything beautiful in its time” (3:11, NIV).

Source:

NOAA Okeanos Explorer. 2017. Daily Updates.

UFO in the Sea Is a “Cosmic Jellyfish”

Cosmic Jellyfish. Image courtesy of NOAA.





Joel Kontinen

We have just begun to discover some of the most astounding and weird deep-sea creatures, thanks to the expeditions carried out by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), for instance, a ghost octopus, a deep-sea jellyfish, a sea butterfly and even Christmas lights.

During its ongoing Samoa Expedition, a remotely operated underwater vehicle (ROV) spotted a weird jellyfish at 3,000 metres (9,800 feet) below sea level.

These discoveries challenge Darwinian assumptions. Why would nature care what creatures that practically no one ever sees look like?

They remind us of God who created everything beautiful.

Source:

Ghose, Tia. 2017. Mysterious 'Cosmic' Jellyfish Spotted in Remote Ocean Depths. Live Science (1 March).

Created Beauty: God’s Christmas Lights Deep Below the Surface

Image courtesy of the NOAA Office of Ocean Exploration and Research, Deepwater Wonders of Wake.





Joel Kontinen

It might be difficult to avoid seeing Christmas lights at this time of year, especially in the Northern hemisphere.

But it seems that there are amazingly beautiful lights in the most unexpectant places, such as 1,500 metres below sea level.

And they are not man-made.

NOAA’s Okeanos Explorer vessel has mapped large stretches of ocean floors, and found great beauty in places where there are few if any human spectators.

Recently, they discovered glowing corals.

Previously they had photographed glowing jellyfish and an outlandish octopus.

The Bible tells us that God has made everything beautiful.

I would suggest that failing to notice all the beauty around us might be a sign of at least spiritual blindness.

Beauty in nature defies Darwinism. Both the very big things and the tiny ones testify of the Creator.

The Fall described in Genesis 3 did not put an end to great beauty: we even see it in ourselves and other people.

Source:

NOAA. 2016. NOAA Ship Okeanos Explorer August 12, 2016.

Clever Begonias: Blue Leaves Help Them Get More Energy from the Sun

Plum Paisley Begonias. Image courtesy of Karl Thomas Moore, Creative Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0).





Joel Kontinen

For Charles Darwin, the origin of flowering plants was an abominable mystery. Why would the blind watchmaker produce so much beauty?

And they are not only beautiful but they are also amazingly smart and know how to communicate and co-operate with other plants.

Some plants might be able to count.

Plants have tiny but highly efficient factories called chloroplasts that convert sunlight into chemical energy.

Scientists used to think that this conversion happened more or less passively. However, new research published in the journal Nature Plants suggests that plants play a more active role in it.

A brief article in Science explains that British scientists have

“discovered a species of shade-dwelling begonia called Begonia pavonina … that arranges light absorbing components in its leaves to boost their light absorption.”

While “typical chloroplasts contain membrane-bound compartments called thylakoids that stack atop one another in a somewhat haphazard arrangement,” this flowering plant did it in a more sophisticated way:

“In B. pavonina, however, this stacking is far more regular, creating what are known as photonic crystals. These crystalline arrays strongly reflect blue light, giving the leaves an iridescent glow. But more importantly, they concentrate the more abundant green and red wavelengths of light on the leaves’ energy absorbing apparatus. The upshot is that B. pavonina’s leaves soak up as much as 10% more energy than other low-lying forest dwellers. That may not seem like much, but under the thick canopies of Malaysian forests where B. pavonina lives, that extra energy gives the plant the juice it needs to edge out its competitors.”

The take away message is that these flowers are far too clever to be the products of an entirely blind watchmaker. They are beautiful, they are intelligent, and they are designed.


Source:

Service, Robert F. 2016. Blue leaves help plants get extra energy from sun. Science (24 October).

Complex Beauty in Sunflowers: Fibonacci Numbers and Even More Complicated Patterns Defy Darwinian Explanations

More complex beauty in sunflowers than we assumed. Image courtesy of Jon Sullivan, public domain.




Joel Kontinen

The more we get to know about nature, the more complex it appears to be. Think about sunflowers, for instance. Commenting on a recent paper published in the journal Royal Society Open Science, an article in Science says:

“Mathematical biologists love sunflowers. The giant flowers are one of the most obvious—as well as the prettiest—demonstrations of a hidden mathematical rule shaping the patterns of life: the Fibonacci sequence, a set in which each number is the sum of the previous two (1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144, 233, 377, 610, ...), found in everything from pineapples to pine cones.”

This kind of beauty is also seen in us.

The Royal Society paper reports on a citizen science experiment, with data on 657 sunflowers.

The researchers also “found more complex Fibonacci structures not previously reported in sunflowers,” which means that they could not use mechanistic models to explain this beauty.

This suggests that the beauty in the flowers is much more complex than we thought. Darwinists will have a hard time in trying to explain how such fine-tuning could have evolved.

Source:

Bohannon, John. 2016. Sunflowers show complex Fibonacci sequences. Science (17 May).

Weird Deep-Sea Jellyfish Affirms Genesis After Its Kind Principle

“Stunningly beautiful jellyfish.” Image courtesy of NOAA.





Joel Kontinen

We see beauty in the most unexpected places, from huge nebulae to tiny spiders. We see it in flowers, and even in ourselves.

And we shouldn’t forget the deep seas. Recently, NOAA’s Okeanos Explorer vessel has been examining the Marianas Trench, using an unmanned submarine for photography.

A few weeks ago researchers were able to see a “stunningly beautiful jellyfish” at a depth of some 3,700 metres (12,000 feet).

While the creature is weird, it is definitively a jellyfish and not an alien. It confirms the after its kind principle introduced in the Book of Genesis.

If it were a Darwinian world, we would hardly expect to see such beauty so deep below the surface, as it does not have any survival value.


Source:

Okeanos Explorer. 2016. NOAA.

Bubble Nebula: The Heavens Declare The Glory of God

The NGC 7635 Bubble Nebula. Image courtesy of NASA, ESA, Hubble Heritage Team.




Joel Kontinen

The Hubble Space Telescope has just given us a stunning view of the Bubble Nebula.

New Scientist gives some background facts:

“The giant bubble, also known as NGC 7635, is a cloud of gas and dust 10 light years across, located in the constellation Cassiopeia. It was discovered by William Herschel in 1787 and has been partially photographed by Hubble before, but this is the first time the telescope has captured its full glory in a single image.”

The Bubble Nebula reminds us of the beauty we see in creation, and it’s not just us: The Old Testament writers also realised that only an awesome God could make such an awesome universe.

“The heavens declare the glory of God” (Psalm 19:1) and “He has made everything beautiful in its time,” (Ecclesiastes 3:11, English Standard Version).

We can see beauty everywhere, even in us. This challenges the indifferent Darwinian view of the cosmos.

Even in a world that suffers from Adam’s sin, we see amazing comeliness in both the small (such as a peacock spider) and the huge (for instance, galaxies).

We also enjoy wonderful colours and discern mathematical symmetry in all kinds of everything.

Source:

Aron, Jacob. 2016. Hubble telescope catches stunning picture of the Bubble Nebula. New Scientist (21 April).