Survival of the Cockroach

Deuteronomy 14:19

“And every creeping thing that flieth is unclean unto you: they shall not be eaten.”

I have met a few people who love cockroaches – but not many. Most of us hate them. We are repulsed by the sheer alienness (is that a word?) of their appearance. These large insects are famously difficult to kill. There are many who testify – possibly apocryphally – to having trodden on one of these beasties, and yet it still managed to scuttle away after the encounter. Worse still is the fact that many of them can fly. Was it just my imagination that supposed them to be flying straight for my face?

Evolutionary researchers have suggested that their longevity dates back over 200 million years, to a time when all continents were joined in a super-continent called Pangaea. Although creationists would dispute the millions of years, we would not necessarily differ with the rest of the analysis.

For one thing, there very likely was a Pangaea before the Flood. Our supposition is that the volcanic and seismic activities, known in Genesis 7 as the “fountains of the deep”, probably began the rapid process of breaking apart this pre-Flood continent. Second, invertebrates like cockroaches were not placed on the Ark. The Ark contained only land animals and flying creatures with lungs. So, insects – which have a different breathing mechanism – were not included. There were no cockroaches in the Ark! It is likely that roaches survived on vegetation rafts, as there would have been a lot of such debris floating on the surface of the floodwaters.    Author: Paul F. Taylor

Prayer: Thank You, Lord, that Your word is true. Thank You, Lord, for those creation scientists who have studied mechanisms to explain the mechanics of that global Flood in Genesis. Amen.

Ref: Molecular Biology and Evolution (Oxford University Press). “Cockroach ancient geographic and genomic history traced back to last supercontinent.” ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 8 February 2018. <www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/02/180208180359.htm>. Image: Roach in amber, Anders L. Damgaard. License: Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International.