A Lizard on Your Ceiling

Examination of the toe pads of the gecko with optical microscopes at up to 2,000 diameters magnification revealed thousands of little fibres arranged like the tufts of bristles in a toothbrush. Yet the question remained unanswered. An answer was finally provided by the powerful scanning electron microscope, which was able to take a series of remarkable photographs magnified to 35,000 diameters or more.

What was revealed?

The gecko has on its toe pads many millions of fine fibres tipped with little suction cups, each about eight millionths of an inch in diameter. In conjunction with this, the lizard’s feet are designed so that the tips of the toes bend or curl upward so that he can peel off the suction cups gradually at each step and not get himself too firmly stuck to the surface. It is estimated that the gecko has at least 500 million suction cups on his toes.

The extraordinary microscopic structure of the gecko lizard’s toe pads clearly indicates intelligent, purposeful design. No remotely plausible scheme for the origin of the gecko’s suction cups by random mutations and natural selection has yet been proposed by evolutionary theorists. And should some scientist with a clever imagination succeed in devising such a scheme, he would still be without a scrap of fossil evidence to demonstrate that the hypothetical process of evolution actually took place in the past.