Creation Moment 6/9/2024 - What is Convergence about?

And God made the beast of the earth after his kind, and cattle after their kind, and every thing that creepeth upon the earth after his kind: and God saw that it was good. Genesis 1:25

"In conventional evolutionary thinking, the more similar two organisms are to each other, the more recent their common ancestor. However, two organisms can be similar to each other even though they are not closely related. 

That is what convergence is all about. Structures are homologous if they are believed to have arisen from a common ancestor that had that structure. By contrast, evolutionists invoke convergence on an ad hoc basis whenever there are unexpected similarities between life-forms that are otherwise thought to be distantly related.

Evolutionists try to explain convergence in terms of life-forms evolving under similar selection processes that derived from being situated in similar environments, coupled with the presumed fact that there is only a finite number of ways a biological structure can evolve into existence. 

This could theoretically explain convergent features that are superficially similar to each other, such as the bird wing and the insect wing. It is quite another thing to invoke convergence for very similar outcomes.

Consider placentals and marsupials. They are each entirely separate lineages of mammals that are very distant from each other on the

mammalian evolutionary ‘tree’. Yet the placental wolf (Canis) and the Tasmanian wolf (Thylacinus) have extraordinary similarities between their respective skulls. Bergman comments:

“A Tasmanian wolf (thylacine) skull, when examined carefully and compared side by side, can be seen to be distinctly different from a North American wolf skull, even though many of their major skull traits and their overall shape are almost identical” (p. 46).

Bergman adds:
“… the American wolf and the Tasmanian wolf mentioned above, are far too similar to have evolved separately from an ancient common ancestor during the early Cretaceous, as convergent evolution theory postulates … . Their skeletal structures, especially their skulls and teeth, are so similar that, unless compared side by side and labeled, only someone who has previously studied the difference can

distinguish between them. The close similarity is used as part of a museum exhibit in Australia to illustrate the fact that there are fewer differences between the Tasmanian wolf and Canis lupus than between many dog breeds … . As part of their final exam, zoology students at Oxford were required to identify 100 zoological specimens. A ‘dog’ skull that actually was the Tasmanian Wolf Thylacinus, successfully fooled many students until they caught on to the ploy. The examiners then placed an actual dog skull in their laboratory exam, which again confused the students. Dawkins noted that the main ‘way to tell the difference is by the two prominent holes in the palate bone, which are characteristic of marsupials generally’” (pp. 49–50).

Let us take this further. Bergman quotes Harvard’s Stephen Jay Gould, who said human origins “is the product of massive historical contingency, and we would probably never arise again even if life’s tape could be replayed a thousand times” (p. 52).

So evolutionists are being internally inconsistent. 

--On one hand, they say that it is astronomically unlikely that evolution could closely repeat itself. 

--Then evolutionists turn around, and, with reference to the extraordinary similarities between the skull of the marsupial wolf and the skull of the placental wolf, they say that evolution has in fact closely repeated itself. 

Q: So which is it?" 

CMI