Creation Moment 1/28/2022 - "They should hire this gecko to do a funny Darwin commercial"

This their way is their folly: yet their posterity approve their sayings.

Psalm 49:13

 

"Fifteen times. That’s how many times Darwinists at the University

of Minnesota appealed to evolution to explain something. Zero times. That’s how many times they explained how evolution actually did it.

Copycat red nectar shows promise as a natural colorant and is gecko-approved (University of Minnesota).

Plants that secrete colored nectars are part of an exclusive club. To date, only 70 plants in the world are on that list. The colors lure in pollinators, but more recently they sparked the interest of researchers and industry partners in search of natural colorant options.

The gecko part is just incidental to the tale. 

The main plot is a story about red nectar evolving “convergently” in two unrelated flowering plants. When the researchers made artificial red nectar, their pet gecko smacked his lips, apparently in approval, and came back for more but did not return to the plain-colored sample. Science in action.

That part was just old-fashioned controlled experimentation: something about the red color attracted the critter. Evolution proved!

They should hire this gecko to do a funny Darwin commercial.

Maybe the gecko considered red to be a more appropriate color for Valentine’s Day or something, but the humans writing about it told a whopper of a just-so story

about convergent evolution that the gecko’s built-in funny face would fit nicely. 

 

They told how evolution is so flexible, it traces genetic relationships except when it doesn’t. And here, it didn’t. Their story was dressed up for publication in PNAS, where it got a passing grade from editor Natasha Raikhel, Department for Botany and Plant Science, University of California, Riverside, and from secret peer reviewers.

Roy et al., “Convergent evolution of a blood-red nectar pigment in vertebrate-pollinated flowers.” PNAS February 1, 2022, 119 (5) e2114420119; https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2114420119.

This is the paper appealing to evolution 15 times, with another 20 in the references. Examples:

Our findings indicate convergent evolution of a red-colored nectar has occurred across two distantly related plant species. Behavioral data show that the red pigment attracts diurnal geckos, the likely pollinator of one of these plants. These findings join a growing list of examples of distinct biochemical and molecular mechanisms underlying evolutionary convergence and provide a fascinating system for testing how interactions across species drive the evolution of novel pigments in an understudied context.

Finally! Will we get a scientific test of convergent evolution? Will we see “distinct biochemical and molecular mechanisms” that show how it works? About time! So what was the test? (The word test appears 40 times in the paper). 

Here it was: feeding colored nectar and plain nectar to geckos, and learning that they preferred the colored nectar. That was it! Evolution proved!

Surely a distinguished journal like PNAS would recognize this paper as silly, wouldn’t it? Only prestigious scientists get nominated into the National Academy of Scientists (NAS). Except for some jargon, this paper looks like the work of a middle school science project. 

---Geckos like red sugar water instead of plain sugar water. 

---You can even use food coloring to add some red, and they will go for that. 

Q: What on earth does this have to do with Darwinian evolution? 

A: Nothing. The wizards of U Minn are not even sure what animals pollinate one of the two flowers with red nectar. And yet the authors go on and on about convergent evolution.

This study reports an investigation into the biochemical nature and biological function of Nesocodon’s red-pigmented nectar within a phylogenetic and evolutionary framework to address our gap in knowledge of colored nectars.

Aha! So the truth comes out. The paper was not written to test, illustrate or prove evolution. It was written within a phylogenetic and evolutionary framework. Evolution was already assumed, so the authors wanted to talk within their common worldview." CEH