"Prediction: there would be little genetic resemblance between extant and ‘primitive’ life forms (biochemical homology).
*Being separated in deep time, every locus of every gene would have mutated multiple times.
*Thus, Ernst Mayr stated in his 1963 book Animal Species and Evolution “the search for homologous genes [derived from the same ancestor] is quite futile except in very close relatives.”
This was a strong prediction, but it has been falsified repeatedly.
One example: humans share a gene involved in eye formation with
flies. Walter Gehring, University of Basel scientist, remarked: “Much to our surprise, the same gene causes eyeless[ness] in the fruit fly. That came as a total surprise, because we thought that the fruit fly eye was in no way a homologous, a similar structure as in humans.”
*By non-homologous, they meant that the insect compound eye and the human eye could not possibly have arisen from an eye in a common ancestor.
It was a “total surprise” because it was not expected in evolutionary theory, which holds that insect and vertebrate eyes evolved separately. Another failed expectation."
CMI
