How Do Insects Fly?

 

Good morning, and welcome.

 How do insects fly?  Now, you might question my sanity about now, asking this question at the start of my Thursday Thought.  However, I’ve been thinking about this for a short time…and the more I think about it the more I am fascinated by just how these little assemblies of tissue manage flight…some from the moment they are born.

 Think about it.  We humans send people to flight school to learn…not to fly ourselves, but to fly a machine.  We spend lots of time and money practicing and learning.  But insects…these little bugs that make up a huge percentage of the global biomass…many of them can fly, and can fly very, very well.  How do they do it?  How did they learn?

 Well, the short answer is that science doesn’t exactly know how to answer those questions.  We know what they do in flight.  We know how muscles move to make the wings beat in whatever patterns are needed.  We can see the acrobatics they can do when needed and necessary.  But when we try to figure out how they know what to do and how they learned, we just don’t know with certainty.

 We tend to say that they are born with that ability.  That they have the instinctive ability to fly.  That somehow the instructions for flight are impressed into their DNA such that those instructions are passed on from parent to offspring.  Instinct is defined as an inborn pattern of behavior that is characteristic of a species.  We know that somehow the instructions, so to speak, for flying are somehow passed on from one generation to another.  But we have yet, I believe, to see exactly how that happens.

 Anyone who knows anything about the world around us knows that there are multiple thousands of things such as the ability to fly that are passed on from one generation to the next in virtually every species of plant and animal.  What Science doesn’t know is how this ability to pass on needed behaviors developed and how only certain behaviors are passed on while others are not.

 If you know me, you know where this is going.  No, I don’t know the answers to these questions directly.  But I do know that when there is a creative Mind behind all that we see and know, then there is indeed an answer…this didn’t happen by accident or chance.  This is the product of intelligence…of mind…that makes all of this kind of thing happen.

 I’m not a stupid person.  I have at least average intelligence, am educated, and have over seventy years in this world to look around and see how things work.  For the life of me, I can’t see how all of what we see and know…and all of what we can’t see and don’t know…has come about by blind chance.  From what I can see, chance leads to further disorder and chaos…not increased order and organization.  It seems to me that if there was no intelligence behind what we see and know, then we wouldn’t be here to see it or know it.

 I don’t know about you.  I don’t know what you think about bugs that fly, or even if you’ve thought about that at all.  I don’t know what you think about how insects obtain the ability to fly.  I don’t know what you think about how all that we see and know came into being.  I don’t know if you believe in an Intelligence or a Mind that has put all of this together or not.  I don’t know what you think about instinctive behavior or learned behavior, or any of the myriad of other related topics that we could talk about in this Thought.

 But I know that for me, there is an Intelligence that made it all happen and keeps it going.  And that for me, that Intelligence is the God who calls Himself “I AM WHO I AM.”  The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.  The God who revealed himself in Jesus of Nazareth some 2,000 years ago.

 Call me ignorant if you want.  Call me deluded if you want.  Call me brainwashed if you want.  But before you do, I challenge you to look at the evidence…look at it with as unbiased of a frame of mind as you can.

 Then let me know what you have decided.

 Blessings.