The 22 April 2004 edition of Nature magazine carried an
article titled "Developmental Genetics: Bittersweet Evolution." (1) Written
by Günter Theißen, the article reported a study by Beverley Glover and her colleagues
on the tomato and bittersweet, which was published in the journal Gene. (2)
The report revealed that these two plants are identical in terms of the appearance
of the organ known as the anther, which produces the flower's pollen, but that
mutation research has shown that these developed by different pathways. This
raises a question that evolutionists need to answer: How is it that these two
plants, assumed to be descended from a common ancestor, came to develop the
same structure by means of two different pathways? Theißen summed up the situation
thus:
Structures that occur in closely related organisms and that look
the same are usually considered to be homologous - their similarity is taken
to arise from their common ancestry. Common sense suggests that the more complex
such structures are, the less likely they are to have evolved independently
and the more valuable they should be for studying systematics. But what if
"obviously" identical organs have arisen through two mutually exclusive developmental
routes?
The evolutionists who carried out the research imagine themselves
to have provided a reasonable answer to this puzzle and claim that "pepperpots
[anthers] originated twice independently in the lineages that led to tomato
and bittersweet." By telling a tale of convergent evolution they sought to give
the impression that the puzzle had been solved. In truth, however, the facts
that manifestly reject the claim of inheritance from a common ancestor were
concealed.
At this point it will be useful to review the concept of convergent
evolution. Evolutionists maintain that similarities between living things for
which they are unable to establish any close ancestral link came about through
convergent evolution. According to this claim, random mutations took place one
after the other and in the same order, and under the effects of alleged similar
environmental factors living things exposed to the same evolutionary pressure
developed similar structures. In summary, the convergent evolution model is
a concealing tactic employed to attach an "evolutionary" label to phenomena
that cannot be "explained" by the theory of evolution.
To give an example, there is a very close resemblance between the
skull of the Tasmanian wolf, now extinct, and the North American wolf. However,
the Tasmanian wolf, which lived in Australia, is a member of the marsupial mammal
group. The North American wolf, on the other hand, belongs to the placental
mammal group. There are deep physiological differences between placental mammals
and marsupials, and there is no close common ancestor that evolutionists can
propose between the Tasmanian wolf and the North American wolf. The similarities
between the two cannot thus be explained in terms of a common ancestor, in other
words by the homology thesis.
However, there are also "reserve" evolutionist terms for similar
structures that cannot be accounted for in terms of homology. These are known
as "analogues." Analogous organs that cannot be explained by a common ancestor
are regarded as the product of a convergent evolutionary process that took place
in such a way as to produce similar structures from different branches. The
true name for this dogmatic approach is not of course science, but the worship
of chance under a scientific guise. The French zoologist Paul Grassé drew attention
to this unscientific belief, saying that "...Chance becomes a sort of providence,
which, under the cover of atheism, is not named but which is secretly worshipped."
(3)
Due to their materialist beliefs, evolutionists deny that living
things, whose intelligent design is so obvious, were created by God. Instead
they cling to the irrational belief that blind chance and aimless, unconscious
natural phenomena could twice have produced the same structures. This model,
known as convergent evolution, consists of an attempt to insist on an evolutionary
explanation stemming from this belief. In this way, one way or another, the
facts are interpreted in an evolutionary light and are adapted to fit the theory.
This is a clear indication that scientists have adopted evolution as a scientific
religion. The British scientist H.J. Lipson states:
In fact, evolution became in a sense a scientific religion; almost
all scientists accepted it and many are prepared to 'bend' their observations
to fit in with it. (4)
Indeed, Theissen's words in Nature magazine clearly reveal
this "bending:"
Molecular systematic analysis confirms that tomato and bittersweet
are closely related, and the traditional view would be that their pepperpot
cones are obviously homologous. But genetic tinkering and mutant analysis
show that they probably are not - that they are convergent, having taken different
routes to the same end. Life's potential to invent complex structures more
than once may worry systematists, who depend on reliable characters to reconstruct
relationships between organisms. But it will please anyone who admires nature's
innovative power.
As we have seen, Theißen is making a nonsensical act of faith by
saying that this structure is definitely homologous but probably convergent,
and is blindly interpreting this as the work of the so-called creative force
of nature. To put it another way, he is stating his devotion to his own religion.
We call on Nature magazine to abandon its support for
the scientific religion known as evolution and to put an end to blindly portraying
convergent evolution scenarios as scientific.
