Tag: Convergent evolution

Close up portrait of a cute baby chimpanzee making eye contact

^{Type
post

Author
Casey Luskin

Date
February 20, 2023

Tagged
Africa, ape-like fossils, beta-globin pseudogene, Bill Nye, Casey Luskin, common ancestry, convergence, Convergent evolution, David Snoke, Eugenie Scott, Fossil Record, genome comparison, genus homo, hominids, human evolution, journal Genetics, Kenneth Miller, Michael Behe, Queen Mary University of London, Richard Buggs, Science and Faith in Dialogue}

Chimp and Human Genomes: An Evolution Myth Unravels

_{Casey Luskin

February 20, 2023}

On today’s ID the Future, Casey Luskin rebuts the oft-repeated claim that the human and chimp genomes are 98-99% similar and therefore surely resulted from Darwinian common descent. Luskin cites an article in the journal Science which describes the 98-99% claim as a myth. The original figure was derived from a single protein-to-protein comparison, but once you compare the entire genomes, and use more rigorous methods, the similarity drops several percentage points, and on one account, down into the mid-80s. Additionally, the chimp genomes used in the original comparison studies borrowed the human genome for scaffolding, thus artificially boosting the degree of similarity. What about supposed junk DNA similarities between human and chimp? Why would an intelligent designer put the Read More ›

illustration of a fighting bull, smoky environment, image generated by AI

^{Type
post

Author
Andrew McDiarmid

Date
February 13, 2023

Categorized
Evolution

Tagged
animal behavior, bobbit worm, bobbit worms, bristle worms, cattle, circadian clock genes, circalunar clocks, conservation of function, Convergent evolution, cows, crown height, cryptochrome protein, equids, Evolution, Evolution News, Gordon D. Sanson, grass-eaters, horses, L-Cry, lion fish, lunar cycle, lunar oscillator, Nature Communications, P. dumerilii, palolo worm, PNAS, ruminants, Thomas Kuhn, tooth evolution, University of Wien, Valerio et al.}

Ruminants, Moon Watchers Bedevil Darwin

_{Andrew McDiarmid

February 13, 2023

Evolution}

On today’s ID the Future host Andrew McDiarmid brings listeners a couple of fascinating recent articles from Evolution News & Science Today by David Coppedge. The first is “Animals Tune Behavior by Lunar Cycle; but How?” The second article is “Darwin, We Have a Problem: Horse Teeth Are Not Less Evolved.” In the first, some ingenious molecular engineering crops up in widely divergent creatures, giving them some impressive abilities to read lunar cycles. The evolutionists’ go-to explanation is “convergent evolution,” an incantation that fails to explain how something like this could have evolved even once, much less multiple separate times. And in the second, a much-beloved story of ruminant tooth evolution gets a kick in the teeth from a series Read More ›

^{Type
post

Author
Günter Bechly

Date
June 27, 2022

Categorized
Evolution

Tagged
amphibians, azure damselfly, beak size, Birds, body plan transitions, Butterflies, Cambrian Explosion, cedars, coloration, compound eyes, conifers, Convergent evolution, countercurrent heat exchange, damselflies, Darwinism, European common frog, Evolution, finches, furs, Galapagos Islands, genetic disparity, genetic switches, Hawaiian honey creepers, house sparrow, houseflies, human beings, iguana, land iguana, marine iguana, Moor frog, northern damselfly, species divergence, stabilizing selection, stasis, teleological end point, tree sparrow, warblers, whale evolution, whale origins}

Species Pairs: A New Challenge to Evolutionary Theory

_{Günter Bechly

June 27, 2022

Evolution}

On today’s ID the future, German paleoentomologist Günter Bechly and host Casey Luskin unpack a recent article of Bechly’s at Evolution News, “Species Pairs: A New Challenge to Darwinists.” There Bechly describes a challenge to evolutionary theory that thus far has been given little attention, namely “the morphological similarity of modern species pairs.” He says this “poses a severe problem for Darwinian theory “because it implies that the macroevolutionary processes that allegedly were at work and common during all periods of Earth history and in all groups of organisms, apparently were totally absent in the origins of all of the millions of living species.” Or as he puts it in a follow-up article on the same topic, “Among the 350,000 Read More ›

^{Type
post

Author
Eric Cassell

Date
April 18, 2022

Categorized
Intelligent Design

Tagged
aircraft navigation, altruism, Animal Algorithms, animal navigation, ant colonies, army ants, Artificial Intelligence, biomimetics, Boeing 737, Charles Darwin, complex systems, constrained optimization, Convergent evolution, design trade-offs, eusocial behavior, evo-dev, Evolution, evolutionary developmental biology, eye evolution, eyes, Hank Hanegraaff, insect architecture, integrated systems, methodological materialism, Natural Selection, navigation systems, orphan genes, purpose, selection pressure, social insects, spider silk, spiderwebs, suboptimal design, teleology, teleophobia, termite altruism, termite mounds, termites, top-down engineering, wasps}

Hank Hanegraaff and Animal Algorithms Author Eric Cassell, Pt. 2

_{Eric Cassell

April 18, 2022

Intelligent Design}

On today’s ID the Future, radio host Hank Hanegraaff continues his conversation with Animal Algorithms author Eric Cassell. Here they look at more insects with strikingly sophisticated innate behavior, suggesting intricate algorithms encoded into their brains from birth, all of which cannot be effectively explained by reference to Darwinian evolution. Cassell and Hanegraaff touch on wasp martial arts; termite altruism and termite architectural skills, including a cooling system that has inspired a human design; interdependent social caste systems that enhance fitness; and spiderweb architecture and the extraordinary properties of spider silk, including the different kinds of silk and the spider’s ability to employ different types precisely tailored for different needs. Cassell looks at evolutionary explanations for these innate abilities that Read More ›

^{Type
post

Author
Eric Cassell

Date
April 13, 2022

Categorized
Intelligent Design

Tagged
aircraft navigation, altruism, Animal Algorithms, animal navigation, ant colonies, army ants, Artificial Intelligence, biomimetics, Boeing 737, Charles Darwin, complex systems, constrained optimization, Convergent evolution, design trade-offs, eusocial behavior, evo-dev, Evolution, evolutionary developmental biology, eye evolution, eyes, Hank Hanegraaff, insect architecture, integrated systems, methodological materialism, Natural Selection, navigation systems, orphan genes, purpose, selection pressure, social insects, spider silk, spiderwebs, suboptimal design, teleology, teleophobia, termite altruism, termite mounds, termites, top-down engineering}

Hank Hanegraaff Interviews Animal Algorithms Author Eric Cassell, Pt. 1

_{Eric Cassell

April 13, 2022

Intelligent Design}

On this ID the Future radio host Hank Hanegraaff interviews Animal Algorithms author Eric Cassell about insects and other small-brained animals with innate behaviors of astonishing sophistication — desert ants, leafcutter ants, honey bees, spiders, monarch butterflies, and many more. These appear to be hard-wired from birth with complex algorithms coded into their neural networks, and some of the algorithms seem to involve complex mathematics. Also mysterious: many of these innate abilities are do or die. So how could they have blindly evolved one small Darwinian step at a time? Also, how would genetic mutations generate the ability to make navigational calculations (as in the case of some birds) that for humans require spherical geometry? Listen in to learn more Read More ›

^{Type
post

Author
Casey Luskin

Date
January 12, 2022

Categorized
Evolution

Tagged
ad hoc explanations, biogeography, camera eye, Casey Luskin, cephalopods, coalescence, common descent, common design, Comprehensive Guide to Science and Faith, convergence, Convergent evolution, Emily Reeves, epicycles, evolutionary tree, falsifiability, Falsification, Fossil Record, Homology, human eye, Intelligent Design, lateral gene transfer, new world monkeys, octopus, octopus eye, old world monkeys, phylogenetic tree, primate rafting hypothesis, Science and faith, Simon Conway Morris, sloths, unfalsifiable, universal common ancestry, vertebrate eye}

Casey Luskin: Biogeography Is No Friend of Common Descent

_{Casey Luskin

January 12, 2022

Evolution}

On this ID the Future, geologist Casey Luskin discusses biogeography and the problems it poses for the idea of universal common descent. To make it work, evolutionists have to propose, for instance, that old world monkeys rafted across the Atlantic from Africa to South America on a natural raft. Really? That’s some raft. And how did the monkeys not starve to death? Or die of thirst? They couldn’t drink salty ocean water, after all. And talk about a genetic bottleneck! That’s just one of several problems Luskin raises with the idea that all species gradually evolved from a universal common ancestor. In his conversation with host Emily Reeves, he also touches on the problem of convergence, as when two creatures Read More ›

^{Type
post

Author
Eric Cassell

Date
December 22, 2021

Categorized
Intelligent Design

Tagged
adaptation, Animal Algorithms, animal behavior, bird navigation, Casey Luskin, chemotaxis, common ancestry, complex programmed behaviors, convergence, Convergent evolution, Darwinian Evolution, Darwinism, Eric Cassell, eusociality, Evolution, genetic engineering, geomagnetic reversal, gradualistic adaptation, ID 3.0, innate behavior, insect social behavior, instinct, Intelligent Design, intelligent design research, Jerry Fodor, Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini, Natural Selection, neural networks, pheromone trails, pheromones, purpose, social colonies, social insect genomes, social insects, solitary behavior, spherical navigation, spiders, teleology, teleophobia}

Animal Algorithms Webinar Pt. 2: Author Q&A

_{Eric Cassell

December 22, 2021

Intelligent Design}

Today’s ID the Future is Part 2 of a recent live webinar with Eric Cassell fielding questions about his new book, Animal Algorithms: Evolution and the Mysterious Origin of Ingenious Instincts. He and host Casey Luskin explore the engineering wonders of web-spinning spiders and their extraordinary silk, and the challenge of transforming solitary insects into social insects (with their complex and interdependent caste systems) via a blind step-by-step evolutionary process, and the many thousands of genetic changes required. What does Cassell consider the best explanation? He invokes design theorist William Dembski’s work with No Free Lunch theorems to argue that blind processes are a no-go for explaining their origin. From there Luskin opens the webinar up to questions from the Read More ›

^{Type
post

Author
Marcos Eberlin

Date
August 26, 2019

Tagged
__edited, carnivorous plants, convergence, Convergent evolution, devolution, foresight, homoplasy, irreducible complexity, Marcos Eberlin, Venus flytrap}

The Venus Flytrap Takes a Bite Out of Darwinism

_{Marcos Eberlin

August 26, 2019}

On this episode of ID the Future, Scotsman Andrew McDiarmid reads from Marcos Eberlin’s recent book Foresight: How the Chemistry of Life Reveals Planning and Purpose. In this excerpt, the distinguished Brazilian scientist highlights the challenge the Venus flytrap poses for evolutionary theory. Dr. Eberlin, the former president of the International Mass Spectrometry Association, describes the problem: The Venus flytrap, like all carnivorous plants, had no use for its insect-trapping function unless it also had an insect-digesting function. And vice versa. Did they really both evolve together? And how when there would be no functional advantage along much of the evolutionary pathway to the sophisticated finished system? Finally, how did this “evolutionary miracle” also happen in four other carnivorous plant Read More ›

^{Type
post

Author
Winston Ewert

Date
October 10, 2018

Tagged
__edited, Biologic, common descent, common design, computer code, Convergent evolution, Darwin’s tree of life, Darwinism, dependency graph, Dependency Graph of Life, Evolution, Evolutionary Informatics Lab, hierarchical classification of life, Homology, Intelligent Design, nested hierarchy, software}

Winston Ewert Unpacks his New ID Model, the Dependency Graph–Pt. 1

_{Winston Ewert

October 10, 2018}

On this episode of ID the Future, guest host Robert J. Marks talks with Dr. Winston Ewert about Ewert’s groundbreaking new hypothesis challenging Darwin’s common descent tree of life. The new model is based on the well-established technique of repurposing software code in different software projects. Ewert, a senior researcher at Biologic and the Evolutionary Informatics Lab, describes the nested hierarchical pattern of life and how any credible theory of life’s origin and diversity must explain it. He then describes how Darwin’s basic theory fits, and doesn’t fit, the pattern, and the various ancillary mechanisms invoked to close the gaps. These patches include horizontal gene transfer, convergent evolution, and incomplete lineage sorting. Ewert then cues up what he argues is a better, more elegant hypothesis, the common design hypothesis laid out in his peer-reviewed technical paper available here.

Lee Spetner Critiques Convergent Evolution and Talks Non-Random Evolution

_{Keith Pennock

September 5, 2017}

On this episode of ID the Future, Ira Berkowitz interviews M.I.T. Ph.D. Lee Spetner in Jerusalem. Spetner challenges the idea of convergent evolution and explains his non-random evolutionary hypothesis.