Thursday 29 June 2017

Convergent Evolution Does Not Rescue a Darwinian Dilemma

Look like my distant cousin? Image courtesy of KENPEI, Creative Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0).




Joel Kontinen

The Darwinian community has an enormous problem that Science Daily recently tried to downplay.

When Australian fish “separated by 30– 50 million years of evolution" look like they were siblings, this is said to fulfil a Darwinian prediction.

The report was based on a paper published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B and it “identified significant convergence in body form between Australian freshwater terapontid grunters and several distantly related marine fish families.”

Science Daily goes on to exclaim: “Convergent evolution is one of the fundamental predictions of evolutionary theory.”

It is no such thing. In contrast, it falsifies Darwin’s tree of life. Only close relatives should look alike.

But very often genetically distant species look alike, regardless of how long ago they parted ways (in the Darwinian scenario, that is).

Evolutionists resort to convergent evolution as an excuse for why Darwinian predictions fail so often.

Source:

James Cook University. 2017. Distant fish relatives share looks. Science Daily (15 June).