This is a problem known as convergence. 2 Strikingly similar features show up in “unrelated” evolutionary lineages. This forces evolutionists to say that the feature evolved more than once, independently. For instance, they must say that the eye evolved about forty separate times. In fact, convergence is so popular that evolutionists almost seem to think it is the rule, not the exception. 3
God made nature with convergence to look unlike evolution. 4
Examples of Convergence
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Sources
Meyer, S. C. (2013). Darwin's Doubt: The Explosive Origin of Animal Life And the Case for Intelligent Design. New York: HarperOne.
Dawkins, R. (2004). The Ancestor's Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
ReMine, W. J. (1993). The Biotic Message: Evolution Versus Message Theory. Saint Paul, Minn.: St. Paul Science.
Notes
- Meyer, 2013, p. 133: “The theory of universal common descent assumes that, generally, the more similar two organisms are, the more closely related they must be. Assuming common descent, animals with wildly differing body plans should not be closely related. The presence of nearly identical individual traits or structures within organisms exemplifying otherwise different body plans cannot, therefore, be attributed to evolution from a common ancestor. Instead, evolutionary biologists attribute similar traits or structures in such a context to so-called convergent evolution, the separate or independent origin of similar characters emerging on separate lines of descent after the point at which those lines diverged from their last common ancestor. Convergent evolution demonstrates that similarity does not always imply homology, or inheritance from a common ancestor.” ↩
- Meyer, 2013, p. 133: “Invoking convergent evolution negates the very logic of the argument from homology, which affirms that similarity implies common ancestry, except—we now learn—in those many, many cases when it does not.” ↩
- Dawkins, 2004, p. 590: “Like any zoologist, I can search my mental database of the animal kingdom and come up with an estimated answer to questions of the form: ‘How many times has X evolved independently?’ It would make a good research project, to do the counts more systematically. Presumably some Xs will come up with a ‘many times’ answer, as with eyes, or ‘several times’, as with echolocation. Others ‘only once’ or even ‘never’, although I have to say it is surprisingly difficult to find examples of these.” ↩
- ReMine, 1993, p. 136: “… ‘convergent’ traits are common in nature because they serve a purpose in the biotic message. Specifically, they look unlike evolution. The human-like eye of the octopus, the fish-like bodies of whales and ichthyosaurs, the duck-like bill of the platypus — these are all visible clues that life was designed by a single designer. Yet they are especially difficult to explain convincingly by evolution.” ↩