Creation Moment 6/30/2016 - Hairy Evolutionary Tales

Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools,

Romans 1:22

"Scales are not feathers are not hair, but evolutionary tales get hairy sometimes.

It’s evolutionary storytelling time in Geneva, where Darwinians conjure up bearded dragons evolving into bearded men. It all started when two researchers from Switzerland found thickenings in crocodile skin, then had visions of birds taking off into the trees, with mammals scampering in the underbrush. The tale is told on Science Daily, “Hairs, feathers and scales have a lot in common.” More recondite jargon is supplied in Science Advances to satisfy the academics.

But of course hairs, feathers and scales have some things in common, being composed of keratin, but don’t the differences swamp the similarities? Not to these evolutionists. To understand their thinking, we have to learn a new word: placode. Wikipedia defines it as: “A neurogenic placode is an area of thickening of the epithelium in the embryonic head ectoderm layer that gives rise to neurons and other structures of the sensory nervous system. Placodes are embryonic structures that give rise to structures such as hair follicles, feathers and teeth.”

The story ramps up the tension, heading toward the resolution: lo and behold, the Swiss researchers find evidence for placodes in reptiles. They examine eggs of crocodiles, corn snakes and bearded dragons (a kind of lizard) and found local thickenings of the epidermis—at least briefly during development. Common ancestry is saved!

Jump to the Methods section in the paper. One notices that they did not do any work on birds or mammals: just on 3 species of reptiles, and there, only on their eggs.

The researchers scraped some scale protein, took photos, and studied DNA sequences from these reptile eggs. That’s about it. No feathers or hairs were found on the reptiles, but they found a gene that disrupts scale formation in bearded dragons, just like it disrupts beards in humans.

The Swiss evolutionists think they are doing their job by weaving stories from “physical and molecular mechanisms.” They think that tiny, evanescent thickenings in the epidermis of a crocodile egg led to the luscious locks of the Breck Girl. They think that switching off one gene in a bearded dragon proves the evolution of Grizzly Adams’s beard. See? Everyone believes in miracles. And the evolutionists believe in the supernatural, too. They believe that logical and moral truths emerge from physical and molecular mechanisms." CEH

The Point: Common Design would bear some common similarities....