Tigers' stripes

 

Image courtecy of Charles J. Sharp, CC BY-SA 4.0

Joel Kontinen

How did the tiger get its stripes? According to the British nobelist Rudyard Kipling who stated  in 1902 collection Just So Stories for Little Children. The tales were light-hearted explanations of how animals got a certain trait, as the names of the stories indicate, for instance How the Leopard got His Spots or How the Camel got his Hump..

According to Live Science, “Tiger stripes vary between individuals, much like fingerprints in humans. The markings play an important role in helping a tiger remain hidden while hunting prey. The stripes help break up the blend in with tall grass.”

It goes on the say, “in 1952, the British Mathematician Alan Turing theorized that a chemical reaction between two homogeneous substances were responsible for the famous tiger-stripe pattern, along with other patterns commonly found in nature. He dubbed these substances "morphogens." One acted as an "activator" and the other as an "inhibitor" — with the "activator" causing a stripe to form and the "inhibitor" creating a blank space.

And, “In 2012, a study in the journal Nature Genetics experimentally validated this theory by identifying the morphogens at play in the formation of ridge patterns in the mouths of mice.”

This is according to Darwinian storytelling, with no strings attached to the truth. 

Source:

Elise Poore 2024. How 10 animals evolved their iconic features | Live Science  6 January.

 

A Taiwanese surprise: lion + tiger = liger

Ligers. Image courtesy of Hkandy, CC BY-SA 3.0).




Joel Kontinen

Last weekend saw the birth of three ligers in a private zoo in Taiwan. The cubs are the offspring of an African lion and a Bengali tigress. One of the tiny ligers died soon after birth but the other two survived.

Animal rights activists are not pleased with the zoo owner for letting different species mate.

Far from providing support for Darwinian evolution, the yet tiny cubs remind us that the biological concept of species is fuzzy and differs from the Genesis concept of kind.

Genesis tells us that animals produce offspring after their kind.

Creationists often use the term baramin, from the Hebrew words bara (created) and min (kind), instead of species. Thus, for instance the dog kind (wolf, coyote, dingo, dog) is one biblical kind. Lions and tigers both belong to the cat kind.

Ligers remind us that Moses knew what he meant when he wrote that animals produce offspring after their kind.


The Taiwanese ligers can grow into big cats like this descendant of a lion and tigress kept in a German zoo.


Source:

Taiwan zoo faces fine over 'liger' cubs. BBC news 17 August 2010.