Echolocation is the ability of an animal, such as a bat, to locate its prey by means of sound. The bat emits a series of extremely high pitched "beeps" and then analyzes the echos that these beeps produce as the echoes of the beeps bounce back off of objects. The concept of echolocation was first utilized by man in World War II when sonar was used to detect the presence of submarines beneath the surface of the sea. A "ping" would bounce off the bottom of the ocean as well but if a submarine were above the bottom it would bounce off the submarine first and it would have a different character.

Bats do the same thing with beeps that are too high in frequency for humans to hear. They send out beeps and the beeps bounce off of flying insects. This is an amazing ability, to be sure, but until recently no one has understood exactly how amazing it is.

The Geipel Study shows that a bat can locate a motionless insect sitting on a leaf in total darkness even when that leaf is located in in the midst of other leaves that also echo and clutter the soundscape. So, by sound alone the bat can locate its prey by shape alone and distinguish it from other shapes. The bat can not only "see" the motionless insect, but it can distinguish what kind of insect it is. For instance, the bat could distinguish between the preferred four-wing dragonfly, the two-winged dragon fly and the dragonfly without wings.1

This discovery settled the question of whether bats used a combination of vision, smell and echolocation or just echolocation to locate a prey.

"As predicted, here we present, to our knowledge, the first experimental evidence that the gleaning bat M. microtis, using FM calls, is able to detect, classify and precisely localize silent and motionless prey within the clutter overlap zone by echolocation alone using a species-specific strategy. The ability to detect prey in acoustic clutter by echolocation alone has been highly debated, and it has been argued that bats gleaning insects from the vegetation need prey-specific cues such as vision, olfaction or prey-generated sounds for prey detection and localization [9,20,40,41] or if hunting actively using echolocation alone exhibited little tolerance of overlap between prey and clutter echoes [26]." Geipel and Jung Study at Sec. 4

That means that by the use of sound echoes alone, it can distinguish an insect from the leaf from the surrounding twigs and leaves and branches. But that ability pales beside the other discovery: By sound alone bats can perceive the texture of a surface.

The bat can distinguish between a paper dragonfly and a real one and paper or aluminum wings and real dragonfly wings. When referring to the wings of dragonflies, the authors of this study state the following:

"... we infer that differences in reflective properties of surface textures are recognized by M. microtis and used for prey classification. The importance of texture information for bats has been already demonstrated for the Indian false vampire bat, Megaderma lyra (Megadermatidae)." Geipel and Jung, Study at Sec. 4.

This is similar to a ship being able to count the rivets on the hull of a submarine by using sonar.

Bats can also identify prey by the doppler effect created by the movement of the wings of the prey in total darkness. That is, the bat can distinguish between a mosquito and a fly by the difference in the way their wings reflect sound. Additionally, the bat alters the frequency of its emissions in order to render the doppeler effect of its own movement to be irrelevant to the identification of the prey. The analyzation of these echos is, unsurprizingly, mathematical and far beyond the scope of this article.2

Where did this astounding - and instantaneous - analysis come from? Where did the mathematical algorythm come from? Who figured it out? It is written into the neurons of the bat's brain that is inscribed into the bat's awareness a picture of sound. What immensely discrete differences are there between the echo from the surface of a dragonfly wing as opposed to the the echo from the surface of a piece of paper the same size? What inconceivably minute changes are there between an echo from off of a leaf as opposed to an echo from off of a leaf with a dragonfly wing sitting .5 centimeter off of its surface. The shape of the sound and the interval between the echo that comes from the leaf and the echo that comes from the wing. One is nanoseconds sooner than the other -- the time it takes sound to travel half a centimeter. That is how accurate the bat's sound perception is.

Evolution has a very simple answer: all of the bats who could not perceive the texture of the wing of a dragonfly by sound echoing off of its surface died.

That is no answer at all. They have absolutely no answer as to how this amazing ability came to be -- other than accidentals and environmental stress. That is no answer at all.

One need only to presume absolutely nothing about God to conclude that the inconceivably accurate hearing and the non-physical algorithm written into the bat's brain were intentionally created. And to believe that they were the result of fortunate mutations and environmental stress, one has only to presume that God does not exist. The presumption of no Creator is essential to the theory of evolution because if that presumption were never made, the answer to these wonders would be obvious.

So, for the theory of evolution, it really comes down to religion. The evolutionist must take a religious position in order for his theory to be viable. The Creationist, however, need presume nothing at all about creation and the evidence points directly to the Creator.

The bat was not created by a series of unobserved extremely fortunate mutations and "environmental stress." The bat was created by the same entity that created the reader and that entity is God, the Creator of all life. There is no other reasonable explanation.

1. Perception of Silent and Motionless Prey on Vegetation in the Gleaning bat Microycteris Microtis, by Inga Geipel and Kirsten Jung of the University of Ulm, Germany; and Elisabeth K. V. Kalko, of the University of Ulm and the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, Panama; Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences. This study carries an unrestricted copyright and is available for download here or at https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3574334/. The copyright information is located at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/.

2. See Detection of oscillating target movements by echolocation in the Greater Horseshoe bat, Hans-Ulrich Schnitzler and Erwin Flieger, LehrstuhlZoophysiologie, Institut Fur Biologie III, Eberhard-Karls-Universitat, D-744 Tubingen, Federal Republic of Germany, June 20, 1983 at https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF00612592.