Summer film shows animated evidence of intelligent design

Breeze Reader's View

One of last summer's true box office success stories was Disney/Pixar's "Finding Nemo." This good-natured children's film depicted a fanciful undersea world rendered entirely in computer animation. In addition to great graphics, the film also taught viewers numerous valuable lessons — namely, the importance of family and the power of hope in the face of personal tribulation.

An in-depth look into the real-life biology of the movie's star character, Nemo, also can teach fans a crucial lesson about the nature of our world's creation. The intricate relationship between the clown fish and it's symbiont, the sea anemone, should lead all viewers to marvel at the beauty and wonder of the natural world and its eternal creator.

The clown, or anemone, fish actually are a group of fish of the genus Amphiprion. All are native to the warm waters of the Pacific Ocean and parts of the Indian Ocean. These fascinating creatures have intrigued naturalists, scuba divers and tropical fish hobbyists for decades due to their beautiful appearance and habit of residing within the arms of the deadly sea anemone.

Research by marine biologists, such as the late Roger Lubbock of Oxford University, has helped shed light on how the clown fish is able to survive — and even thrive — within the anemone's lethal embrace. It has been shown that the clown fish's own mucus has a property that deactivates the anemone's nematocysts, or stinging cells.

This by itself, however, is not sufficient protection for the fish, as evidenced by the fact that a clown fish separated from its host for an extended period will be stung the first few times it tries to reenter the anemone. In order to gain complete protection, the fish also must incorporate the anemone's own protective mucus. This is accomplished by brushing against the anemone, and even by nibbling at its tentacles.

This bizarre and noteworthy example of symbiosis has baffled Darwinists for ages, who have searched in vain for an adequate explanation of how such a relationship could have developed. The nature of the problem facing Darwinists is clear, due to evolution's ever-present need to describe the development of biological traits through a process of slow, gradual changes. This notion of gradual change has proven wholly inadequate when applied to the clown fish/ anemone relationship.

The clown fish's immunity could not have developed through a gradual process. The Darwinists' primitive clown fish entering an anemone for the first time, unless blessed with the ability both to deactivate the anemone's stinging cells and to incorporate the anemone's own mucus, would have faced, at best, sickness and, at worst, certain death.

Darwinists then are left with the dubious task of imagining how subjecting itself to continual sickness or violent death could have proved beneficial for an entire species of fish. Complicating the matter for them is the fact that clown fish entirely are capable of surviving independently from anemones. Evolutionists' attempts to explain this phenomenon have been more suited to the realm of science fiction than science fact.

An example of one rather fantastic theory that has been put forward in times past was that the clown fish never actually touched the anemone's tentacles at all. If this were the case, evolutionists pondered, perhaps the clown fish merely evolved to be nimble enough to avoid its host's sting. This idea has been refuted flatly by observations of fish literally sleeping on top of their host anemone's tentacles.

In his groundbreaking book "Darwin's Black Box," Lehigh University biochemist Michael Behe levies a full frontal assault against the theory of evolution with his idea of irreducible complexity.

Defining his theory, Behe writes, "By irreducibly complex I mean a single system composed of several well-matched, interacting parts that contribute to the basic function, wherein the removal of any one of the parts causes the system to effectively cease functioning. An irreducibly complex system cannot be produced directly — that is, by continuously improving the initial function, which continues to work by the same mechanism — by slight, successive modifications of a precursor system because any precursor to an irreducibly complex system that is missing a part is by definition nonfunctional."

By examining the clown fish's symbiosis, it is clear how this would fit Behe's definition of an irreducibly complex biological system. If either of the fish's two protective traits, its nematocyst disarming mucus and its ability to assimilate the anemone's mucus, were absent, then the entire relationship would in no way have been beneficial to clown fish.

The only logical conclusion is to admit the fact that the clown fish must have been the result of an intelligent designer who created both it and its host to live together in harmony. When Genesis 1:20 describes God as calling for the creation of all sea creatures, it is safe to conclude that he meant what he said and accomplished what he willed.

Andrew Chudy is a junior IDLS major.