Subject: Re: Dinosaurs and Job
Date: 15 Nov 1999 03:45:01 GMT
From: Chris Ho-Stuart < 
Newsgroups:
aus.religion.christian
Robert Davidson > wrote:
> Rod Jackson wrote:
>
>> Have you heard of the bomadary beetle (sp?) - with it’s double chamber
>> system. It makes little bombs by squirting two explosive chemicals out its
>> back at an angle so that the chemicals collide in the air a little way
>> behind the beetle. A similar system could be used to have a creature that
>> literally breathed fire.
>
> For some reason this innocent beetle (the bombadier beetle) has a lot of
> misinformation out about it.  Try mixing the two chemicals found in the
> beetle’s body, and you will find no explosion occurs.

Let’s tell the full story here.
Properly catalyzed, the two chemicals
do react violently; and the beetle does
in fact use the catalyzed explosion as
a defense mechanism.

Hence Rod’s main point stands.
There is not the slightest evidence of
any fire breathing creatures, of course;
but his point that living creatures can
do surprising things with explosive
chemicals is true enough.

Rod’s description of the beetle is
a bit off, and it could be that he has
been mislead by some creationists who
have asserted (for the purposes of a
characteristically incompetant
anti-evolutionary argument) that the
chemicals explode when mixed. They
don’t, in fact; because the
additional catalyst is required.

The truth is even more surprising. The
explosion does not take place outside
the beetle, but inside the beetle’s
body. There are two chambers.  The first
chamber is where the chemicals are mixed.
The mixture is then fed into a reaction
chamber, where the explosion is catalyzed
to take place inside the beetle’s
body. It is because the explosion take
place inside that the beetle is able to
direct a powerful jet of boiling hot
chemicals from an exit of the reaction
chamber.

You can find lots of information on the
bombadier beetle at the talk.origins
archive, at
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/bombardier.html 

Cheers-Chris Ho-Stuart

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