How and why the zebra got its stripes

My brother Thom always warns: “ Don’t believe everything you think.” He’s so right!Take the question: “How and Why did the zebra get its stripes? Scientists, that is to say the kind of people who invent “theories” of so-called “evolution” and “global climate change,” offer contradictory “scientific” answers to what should be a simple question with a simple answer. Look at these four “scientific” explanations. Zebras have stripes, but why? (1) To camouflage the animal when it walks in the the light and shadows of the woods, swamps and jungles.(2) To disrupt predators such as lions by dazzling them into misjudging prey movement and individuals in a running herd.(3) To cool off the zebra in hot weather by setting off little convection currents on the skin of the animal.(4) To protect the zebra from bloodthirsty flies shown to prefer landing on solid colors rather than stripes.It’s clear that scientists can’t really agree on anything. They just make it up. They design research projects to prove what they had already decided to discover in the first place. So much for science. What we need is to resort to higher authority on such important questions in order to get a clear answer that we can all really believe in, whether we think about it or not. So, we turn to Scripture.We all know from Genesis about the plain fact of the origin of life. On the fifth day of creation, God said: “Let the earth bring forth living creatures according to their kind: cattle and creeping things and beasts of the earth according to their kind. It was so, and God saw that it was good.” (Genesis 1:24.)What you may or may not know is the origin of spots, speckles and stripes on cattle, horses, zebras, tigers, leopards, hyenas and butterflies. Jacob started a global trend in color patterns: “Jacob took fresh rods of poplar and almond and plane trees, and peeled white streaks in them, exposing the the white of the rods.” He then used watering troughs to attract his flock animals to the site of the tree stripes. What did he do then and why?Jacob knew that the flocks bred when they came in to drink. “And since they bred when they came to drink, the flocks bred in front of the rods, and so the the flocks brought forth striped, speckled and spotted” offspring.(Genesis 30:37) Somehow, this simple color pattern creation process got translated onwards to zebras, tigers and other animals. And the result was good. Who doesn’t like striped zebras?Personally, I’m not entirely satisfied with the above revelations. Are “creationism” and “evolution” necessarily mutually exclusive? For example, could God be allowed to use “evolution” as a method for “creation” of life forms, colors, patterns, stripes and spots if He chose to do so? As Danish scientist Nils Bohr warned Albert Einstein in the context of the famous debate over quantum mechanics and the Heisenberg “uncertainty” principle, “Please stop telling God what He can and cannot do.” Einstein had to agree that Bohr had a point. Maybe we should too.Anthony Piel is the former director and general legal counsel of the World Health Organization.