Conway Morris almost sounds like an ID theorist. No wonder the BBC had to bring a bunch of people on toward the very end to imply that he is an idiot.
Convergent evolution
At ScienceDaily: “astonishingly similar biomechanical solutions” for ingesting liquid food have evolved in widely distant animal groups.
There is a fundamental conceptual error in that last remark by Alexander Blanke (though it may have been something he felt forced to say): The question is not whether a sucking pump would be an advantage but how it could have arisen independently twice by natural selection acting on random mutations within the time available. And no, “natural selection” is not supposed to be a synonym for “hocus pocus.”
Common ancestry: If the Khan Academy must front Darwinism, why use such unconvincing arguments?
Because of widespread convergent evolution, claims about common ancestry can’t be based on similarity of form alone — any more than we can assume that two people who look quite similar (body doubles) must be closely related. Life is more complex than that.
Junk design arguments as junk science: The squid eye and the human eye
Funny that “junk” would develop twice like that, independently and be generally so useful. But people believe what they need to.
Convergent evolution: Cricket ears turn out to be a lot like vertebrate ears
At Evolution News: Other than location (in the heads of vertebrates and on the legs of insects), the functional similarities of the CA to the mammalian cochlea are striking, except that the cochlea is 40 times as long as the insect hearing organ! It’s a remarkable example of convergence already, and there is more to come.
At Mind Matters News: Exoplanets: The same laws of physics means similar life forms
Even on Earth, life forms of widely differing ancestry, arrive at the same solutions to physics problems, leading scientists note. On Simon Conway Morris’s view, life forms that fly on exoplanets will do what birds, bats, and insects do here, they say. Intelligent species may even look roughly like us.
Convergent evolution seen in “hardwiring” of brains to perceive numbers
Crows don’t have a prefrontal cortex so, as Offord notes, [the researchers] suggested convergent evolution (convergence on a common goal rather than common ancestry) as an explanation [for having skills similar to macaques’]. Even so, they say, the quality is probably innate. [Interesting, how often convergent evolution is invoked these days.]
Claim: Modern crocodiles are evolving rapidly
Into what? Crocobirds? Smithsonian Magazine is anxious for us to know that they are NOT “living fossils.” They have evolved a lot, we are told, though admittedly they are evolving around in a circle. It would be interesting to know why stasis became such a threatening concept in some quarters.
New Video Presentation on YouTube: Intelligent Design & Scientific Conservatism
I have recently posted a new video on my Intelligent Design YouTube channel. In this video I discuss several areas in the philosophy of science and modern evolutionary biology, and their relationship to ID. These thoughts were prompted initially by an interesting paper by philosopher of science Jeffrey Koperski ‘Two Bad Ways to Attack Intelligent Read More…
Snakes evolved venom fangs multiple times
Of course, it’s even more unlikely to have all just happened by chance a number of times than just once. Nonetheless, New Scientist tries valiantly to ascribe it all to natural selection (acting on random mutation).
Talk about convergent evolution: Lizards evolved for life in trees at least 100 times
Toepads don’t evolve until after lizards get into the trees, not before. And padless lizards will leave trees at a high frequency — much higher than padbearing lizards. Okay, now here’s a question: How, exactly, does the tree lizard “evolve” toe pads just because they would be convenient? It’s not self-evident. Many lizards did not but others did. As Michael Behe would ask, “How, exactly?”
Researchers: Spiders use the same cues as vertebrates in distinguishing living vs. non-living things
Researchers: Complex vision evolved independently in vertebrates and arthropods and so the ability to distinguish living from non-living motion using the relative positioning of the joints has most likely arisen convergently in the two groups of animals.
At Gizmodo, of all places: A convergent evolution slide show
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?
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.