Regular readers will know that I love everything about birds, and I love every bird. Any my favorite birds of all are parrots! Every time I see a scientific discovery involving parrots, I blog about it. Well, there was just such a discovery, and published in the prestigious peer-reviewed journal Nature. In it, we find evidence for intelligent design, and evidence against Darwinian evolution.
Before we see the new discovery, let’s review with the definition of convergence in biology.
In evolutionary biology, convergent evolution is the process whereby organisms not closely related (not monophyletic), independently evolve similar traits as a result of having to adapt to similar environments or ecological niches.
So, for example, if we could find a feature that is common to parrots and humans, that would be an example of “convergence”, because the same feature would be found in to kinds of creature, but these creatures don’t have a recent common ancestry. The feature would have had to evolve TWICE, independently, and that is not the kind of evidence that Darwinists like.
So here is the discovery, in Science News:
When it comes to speech, parrots have the gift of gab. And the way the brains of small parrots known as budgerigars bestow this gift is remarkably similar to human speech, researchers report March 19 in Nature.
So far, budgerigars are the only animals known to have language-producing centers akin to those in humans, says Michael Long, a neuroscientist at New York University Langone Health. This “is really the first nonhuman animal in which that has been shown.” Understanding how speech gets created in budgies’ brains could help clarify what goes wrong in certain communication disorders in people.
[…]The similarities between human and parrot brains may reflect two species solving a problem in a similar way, neurally speaking. These parallels could be “a very tidy example of convergent evolution, where you have humans that have developed this kind of neural mechanism for speech, and these parrots have developed a kind of similar mechanism,” Long says.
Here’s an excellent, recent article from Evolution News to explain what convergence means for the two competing views of Darwinian evolution and intelligent design:
Biology is replete with instances of convergence — repeated designs in distant species. Marsupials and placentals, for instance, are mammals with different reproductive designs (placentals have significant growth in the embryonic stage attached to the nutrient-rich placenta whereas marsupials have no placenta and experience significant development after birth) but otherwise with many similar species.
The marsupial flying phalanger and placental flying squirrel, for example, have distinctive similarities, including their coats that extend from the wrist to the ankle giving them the ability to glide long distances. But evolutionists must believe that these distinctive similarities evolved separately and independently because one is a marsupial and the other is a placental, and those two groups must have divided much earlier in evolutionary history. Simply put, evolution’s random mutations must have duplicated dozens of designs in these two groups.
It is kind of like lightning striking twice, but for evolutionists — who already have accepted the idea that squirrels, and all other species for that matter, arose by chance mutations — it’s not difficult to believe. It simply happened twice rather than once (or several times, in the cases of a great many convergences).
What is often not understood, however, by evolutionists or their critics, is that convergence poses a completely different theoretical problem. Simply put, a fundamental evidence and motivation for evolution is the pattern of similarities and differences between the different species. According to this theory, the species fall into an evolutionary pattern with great precision. Species on the same branch in the evolutionary tree of life share a close relationship via common descent. Therefore, they share similarities with each other much more consistently than with species on other branches.
This is a very specific pattern, and it can be used to predict differences and similarities between species given a knowledge of where they are in the evolutionary tree.
Convergence violates this pattern. Convergence reveals striking similarities across different branches. This leaves evolutionists struggling to figure out how the proverbial lightning could strike twice…
And convergence is everywhere in the history of life. A common example is echo location in bats and dolphins, but my favorite example is octopus eyes and human eyes.
Here’s an evolutionist explaining the problem:
One of the most remarkable features of octopuses is their eyes, which are remarkably like our own. Like ours, their eyes consist of an iris, a circular lens, vitreous fluid, pigments, and photoreceptors. In fact, the octopus eye is superior to ours in one notable way: Because of the way they develop, the fibers of the optic nerves grow behind the retina rather than through it, meaning they lack the central blind spot common to all vertebrates. And this difference exists because the octopus eye evolved entirely separately from our own, starting from that blind flatworm 600 million years ago, along an entirely different branch of the evolutionary tree.
Got that? No common ancestry for 600 million years. The similar eyes appeared independently. And these are difficult things to make. You can’t write eye code by dropping a bowling ball on a keyboard over and over. To get the design twice strains credulity.
When you look at software, which is my field, you will often see similar solutions to problems across different companies. These companies don’t inherit the solutions from a parent company, they develop them on their own. And often, this process means pulling in “open source” components to solve problems that have already been solved, but not by “ancestors”. The developers who pull in these open source components have no “ancestry” with the developers of these open source components. But they can pull them into a composition of their own, and make use of the component to solve the same problem.
