Saturday 14 February 2015

New Darwinian Story: Darwin’s Finches’ Gene May Explain the Shape of Human Faces


Image courtesy of John Gould, via Wikipedia.



Joel Kontinen

It’s not difficult to understand why Darwinian stories are so fascinating. While they are often more or less fact free and mutually contradictory, there’s no shortage of them.

A new story features Darwin’s finches. For many decades they have served as icons of evolution. The most obvious reason for their inclusion in this club is a dire scarcity of animals that have changed – at least to some extent. However, the changes have been temporary.

Recently, researchers sequenced the genomes of 120 individual finches. According to a report in Science, they found out that Medium ground finches (Geospiza fortis) had “different versions of [the gene] ALX1 depending on their beak's exact shape.”

In humans, mutations in the gene ALX1 “have been linked to frontonasal dysplasia, a birth defect that can range in severity from distinctly wide features or a cleft palate to more serious skull and brain malformations.”

Next, the storytelling takes off: “The researchers hypothesize that smaller variations in ALX1 could be responsible for the diversity of face shapes among people.”

This is not the first time evolutionists have seen human facial features in animals. Two years ago, when researchers discovered Entelognathus primordialis, a fish fossil assumed to be over 400 million years old, they believed they saw hints of a human face in it.

Few evolutionists ever see the circular reasoning in all of this. The only “proof” for this is that since according to Darwinian ideology, we evolved from fish, we should have traits that fish have.

In other words, ideology determines the outcome.

Source:

Williams, Sarah C. P. 2015. Genomes of Darwin’s finches may explain the shape of human faces. Science (11 February).