But wait. “Natural selection,” as usually understood, assumes ancestor-descendant relationships. That’s the point of it. If mammals “have clearly been taking pages from other play books,” how exactly, were they able to do so?
Convergent evolution
Mice from opposite coasts of North America show same the changes in genes
The house mouse, beloved of cats, only arrived in North America with Europeans, so there aren’t millions of years to make up a story about how things happened.
Interesting finding: COVID-19 populations show high convergent evolution
Researchers: We find that two particular mutation rates, G →U and C →U, are similarly elevated and considerably higher than all other mutation rates, causing the majority of mutations in the SARS-CoV-2 genome, and are possibly the result of APOBEC and ROS activity.
Convergent evolution: Our most distant relatives were sponges, not comb jellies, say researchers
Re the researcher’s comment, “It may seem very unlikely that such complex traits could evolve twice, independently, but evolution doesn’t always follow a simple path,” well, he is virtually admitting that Darwinism stretches (snaps?) the bounds of probability but no one is allowed to discuss that honestly. That is most likely why there is a controversy in the first place.
American Museum of Natural History: Whale and hippo skin adaptations evolved independently
Researcher: “Our latest findings contradict the current dogma in the field—that relatives of the amphibious hippo might have been part of the transition as mammals re-entered life in the water.”
An animal you would swear was just plant refuse
If it washed up on the beach. The sea whip coral is technically an animal but you might not guess that.
Odd: Koala fingerprints almost indistinguishable from human ones
Researchers compared the fingerprints of three koalas killed by cars, a chimp that died in captivity, and human ones. The koala prints were more like human ones than the chimp’s were.
Convergent evolution of cobra venom
Researchers: “This is the first clear example of snake venom evolving for defence, and provides a remarkable example of convergent evolution, or how natural selection can cause the same solution to a problem to evolve multiple times.” Sure, it all just somehow happens with no underlying intelligence in nature?
Convergent evolution: Tasmanian tiger pups “extraordinarily”similar to wolf pups
Researchers: While scientists have worked out that different animals evolve to look the same because they occupy similar places in the ecosystem, they have yet to explain how animals evolve to become convergent, particularly the forces driving their early development.
In addition to other weird characteristics, the platypus has biofluorescent fur
Talk about convergent evolution. And if the timing of the split is correct, 150 million years was the amount of time available, not half a billion years. … at least one species of tardigrade lights up as well. One wonders how exactly the individual species of tardigrade (water bear) began to do that. What was the time frame there?
Crabs evolved separately at least five times
At Popular Mechanics: It’s not just superficial shape that unifies the five evolved crab forms. The paper details neurological commonalities, shared circulatory systems, and more, while also detailing the organ and systems that differ in shape and size.
Eric Holloway: To what extent does life simply invent itself as it goes along?
Eric Holloway argues that the evidence does not really support common descent, not the way Talk Origins believes and we were taught in school.
What next? A tree that stings? Yes.
Most interesting: “Our results provide an intriguing example of inter-kingdom convergent evolution of animal and plant venoms with shared modes of delivery, molecular structure, and pharmacology.” Plants and animals are not so different after all.
Darwin skeptic focuses on the repeated evolution of the camera eye
Shedinger: But how could a similar series of mutations of the sort necessary to produce similarly structured eyes in different lineages occur so many times independently if the mutations are randomly produced?
Researchers discover deep sea creatures that suck up light like a black hole
In an “incredible” display of convergent evolution, sixteen different deep-sea fish developed extreme light-absorbing qualities, like a “black hole,” for camouflage amid bioluminescence.