Ecosystems and Biodiversity

A specific area's ecosystem includes all the living things in it, as well as their physical surroundings. Lakes, forests, and coral reefs, together with the living things they harbor, are all examples of ecosystems. Lake Baikal in Siberia, for instance, is an ecosystem containing 1,500 plant and animal species.³³

Each ecosystem has its own unique variety of life. For example, there are dozens of species of trees in a typical North American forest, and hundreds in a South American rain forest.

The point to be emphasized is that any balanced, healthy ecosystem hosts a wide spectrum of living species. A large number of species are linked to one another within a very complex interconnected system, and these play a greater or smaller part in the balanced functioning of the ecosystem as a whole—so much so that sometimes, the absence of a single species can impair an entire system and damage its equilibrium. For example, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, otters in the Northwest American and Western Canadian coasts were hunted almost to the point of extinction. The otters fed on sea urchins, and when these mammals practically disappeared, sea urchins multiplied rapidly and began damaging seaweed beds. Damage to the seaweed had a harmful effect on several species of fish and invertebrates in those same waters and led to a decline in their numbers.

Toward the end of the 20th century, when otters were made a protected species, the seaweed began increasing, and balance in the region was re-established.³⁴

Many more similar cases have been observed, helping us to understand that species spend their lives in perfect harmony with each other and with their surroundings.

But the term extraordinarily complex utterly fails to do justice to the complexity of the system constituted by the glorious variety of life on Earth. To obtain a closer understanding of this, consider the following: Even if all scientists work together, combining all our accumulated technological and scientific knowledge and material means, not even the smallest imitation of one of these systems can be produced. Professor Wilson says that it is totally impossible for scientists to collect species beforehand from a rain forest about to be cut down and to introduce them all somewhere else:

The biologists cannot accomplish this task, not if thousands of them came with a billion-dollar budget. They cannot even imagine how to do it. In the forest patch live legions of species: perhaps 300 birds, 500 butterflies, 200 ants, 50,000 beetles, 1,000 trees, 5,000 fungi, tens of thousands of bacteria and so on down a long roster of major groups. Each species occupies a precise niche, demanding a certain place, an exact microclimate, particular nutrients and temperature and humidity cycles with specified timing to trigger phases of the life cycle. Many, perhaps most, of the species are locked in symbioses with other species; they cannot survive and reproduce unless arrayed with their partners in the correct idiosyncratic configurations.

Even if the biologists pulled off the taxonomic equivalent of the Manhattan Project, sorting and preserving cultures of all the species, they could not then put the community back together again. It would be like unscrambling an egg with a pair of spoons. ³⁵

From Professor Wilson's statements, you can see that no ecosystem can ever be established using human intelligence and knowledge. Therefore, it is totally impossible for ecosystems to come into being through blind chance, as evolutionists maintain. The following statement by the well-known Professor of Botany Karl Niklas from Cornell University is significant:

I don't think that the ecological patterns that we see surfacing in fossils and living organisms and across the continents are a consequence of chance.³⁶

Ecosystems operating in perfect harmony are no doubt manifest proofs of the fact of Creation and the existence of a sublime Creator. At the same time, the Earth's biodiversity and flawless order completely refute Darwinism, which claims that they formed as the result of blind chance and random coincidences.

Let's have a closer look at the fact of Creation in certain ecosystems with a wealth of biodiversity.

References

33. National Geographic, http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2000/12/1201_russianlake.html, December 1, 2000. ↩
34. http://library.thinkquest.org/25014/what/decline.impact.html ↩
35. Edward O. Wilson, In Search of Nature, pp. 197-198. ↩
36. John Whitfield, "All Creatures Great and Small," Nature, Vol. 413, 27 September 2001, p. 344. ↩