Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community

Darwinists actually get lambasted for something? In a journal?

Categories
Darwinism
News
Science
Share
Facebook
Twitter/X
LinkedIn
Flipboard
Print
Email

From Creation Evolution Headlines here:

More Upsets for Darwin

Posted on January 17, 2012

For every hyped-up demonstration of evolution in action the media announces with gusto, there are setbacks that often do not get the splashy headlines.  Here are three recent examples.

Treehopper evolution wasn’t:   Recently a “spectacular” announcement that some bugs called treehoppers had evolved a new functional appendage has been found false.  “Evidence for a spectacular evolutionary novelty was recently reported,” wrote nine scientists in PLoS ONE,1 claiming that the treehopper bugs evolved their odd-looking “helmet” as new thoracic appendages.  Those evolutionists, publishing in Nature,2 were not at all modest in their pronouncement: “Here we show that the treehopper (Membracidae) ‘helmet’ is actually an appendage, a wing serial homologue on the first thoracic segment. This innovation in the insect body plan is an unprecedented situation in 250 Myr of insect evolution.”

Wrong, the  new team reports.  It’s not a novelty, but a common and widely-distributed feature among hemiptera (true bugs) – just an invagination of tissue, not a distinct limb.  The new paper not only corrects the error but criticizes the evolutionists who proposed the wrong idea, telling them basically they should have consulted the insect experts (entomologists) before hopping to a Darwin-tree conclusion. More.