The Tasmanian tiger (thylacine), an Australian marsupial equivalent to a wolf, is believed to be extinct:
Micro-CT scanning and digital reconstructions have been used to compare the skulls of the Tasmanian tiger (thylacine) and wolf across their early development and into adulthood, establishing that not only did the thylacine resemble the wolf as adults, but also as newborns and juveniles.
“Remarkably, the Tasmanian tiger pups were more similar to wolf pups than to other closely related marsupials,” Professor Andrew Pask from the University of Melbourne said.
The collaborative study with Flinders University and Museums Victoria complement earlier findings that thylacine and wolf have evolved similar instructions in their genome, which influence cranial stem cells during development.
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. The study provides significant new insights into how animals develop to look a certain way and then when in development these things happen.
University of Melbourne, “Tasmanian tiger pups found to be extraordinary similar to wolf pups” at ScienceDaily
The paper is open access.
It may be a pattern that relates to the ecology, in the sense that a predator might inevitably end up having the characteristics of a wolf or thylacine.
See also: Evolution appears to converge on goals—but in Darwinian terms, is that possible?
from the article: “… they have yet to explain how animals evolve to become convergent …”
“yet to explain ….” …. yeah yeah, i heard that so many times. But obviously, nobody can’t, and examples of repeated evolution cumulate, but nobody can’t explain how is that possible … all what we hear are Darwinian just-so stories…
here is my blog on convergent/repeated evolution, have a look at some very absurd examples of ‘convergence’
http://www.stuffhappens.info
It might greatly behoove Darwinists to first explain how any individual organism might achieve its own biological form before they try to claim that they have figured out how two different organisms arrived at the same ‘convergent’ biological form.
Darwinists, with their reductive materialistic framework, simply have no clue how any organism might achieve its own distinctive biological form, much less do they have a clue why any two different organisms should take the same biological form. Nor do they even have a clue “why things don’t fall completely apart — as they do, in fact, at the moment of death. What power holds off that moment — precisely for a lifetime, and not a moment longer?”
Needless to say, if, within your reductive materialistic framework, you have no unifying principle to appeal to in order to explain exactly “why things don’t fall completely apart”, then perhaps it is time for you to search for a new framework so as to be able to explain this most fundamental question,, i.e. “What power holds off that moment — precisely for a lifetime, and not a moment longer?”
As Pastor Joe Boot points out, reductive materialists simply have no ‘design plan’ to ‘connect the dots’, in order to explain why the universe takes the form it does, (and also to explain why any organism might take the form that it does).
You don’t have to take Stephen Talbott’s and Pastor Joe Boot’s word for it. The failure of the reductive materialistic framework of Darwinian evolution to be able to explain the basic form of any particular organism occurs at a very low level. (at a much lower level than DNA itself.)
In the following article entitled ‘Quantum physics problem proved unsolvable: Gödel and Turing enter quantum physics’, which studied the derivation of macroscopic properties from a complete microscopic description, the researchers remark that even a perfect and complete description of the microscopic properties of a material is not enough to predict its macroscopic behaviour.,,, The researchers further commented that their findings challenge the reductionists’ point of view, as the insurmountable difficulty lies precisely in the derivation of macroscopic properties from a microscopic description.”
In fact, quantum mechanics, although it is the reigning scientific theory for trying to explain the ‘spooky’ actions of the fundamental particles of the universe, quantum mechanics has, never-the-less, been largely ignored by modern day Darwinian biologists.
Needless to say, for Darwinian biologists to, basically, completely ignore quantum mechanics in their explanations of biology is for them to have a rather large and gaping hole in any of their proposed explanations for biological life.
Which is just as well, for if they did allow quantum mechanics into their proposed scientific explanations of biology, then it would necessarily defeat the entire reductive materialistic framework that undergirds their Darwinian worldview,
Verse and Music
There’s a missing piece in the usual logic. An ecosystem includes every plant and animal and weather condition. Without the wolf type, it’s not the same ecosystem. Gaians try to “reintroduce” wolves and grizzlies into ecosystems that no longer include them, and it doesn’t work.
So the marsupial version and the mammary version of a wolf can’t be pre-existing creatures that happen to wander into the “wolf-shaped hole” in an ecosystem that “needs” them. The entire system, including the wolf type, must be designed in advance.