What Darwin Didn't Know - Part 2: Biological Convergence

I often think back on my life and what I could have done differently etc - what my life would have been like if I had done x instead of y. Sometimes I think if I had been totally obedient to God all of my life, how much better my life would be now in terms of God's blessings. But you know what, I think God loves me just as much as if I had been totally obedient all of my life. And you know what else, even if I could rewind the tape, I'd still be me. I'd still need a savior. I'd mess up somewhere else - there's no way I can keep the law of God, which is why I love Jesus so much. He is my rock and my advocate. Jesus is someone I can trust and who will always be for me and not against me, and understand what I'm going through. He's someone who can pick me back up after I've fallen, dust me off, cloak me in His righteousness, fill me with His spirit, and weave all the disparate threads of my life into a perfect whole. That's Jesus. The God of eternity, who was, and is, and is to come. He makes sense of my life. He makes sense of the origin of the universe. He has conquered the grave. He will one day return again this time to judge the deeds of all men in perfect righteousness.

Speaking of rewinding the tape of my life and doing it all over again, did you know that if you were to rewind all of life's history, and do it all over again, that according to naturalistic evolution all life forms would be completely different? Don't believe me? Here's the late biologist Stephen J. Gould in his work Wonderful Life:

“…No finale can be specified at the start, none would ever occur a second time in the same way, because any pathway proceeds through thousands of improbable stages. Alter any early event, ever so slightly, and without apparent importance at the time, and evolution cascades into a radically different channel.” Stephen J. Gould, Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History (New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Company, 1989), 51.

Or how about Charles Darwin in a later edition of On the Origin of Species:

"It is incredible that the descendants of two organisms, which had originally differed in a marked manner, should ever afterwards converge so closely as to lead to a near approach to identity throughout their whole organisation. If this had occurred, we should meet with the same form, independently of genetic connection, recurring in widely separated geological formations; and the balance of evidence is opposed to any such an admission."

Did you get that last line? "and the balance of evidence is opposed to any such an admission." Why do you suppose Charles Darwin is saying this? What Darwin couldn't believe, and rightly so, is how fundamentally different life forms could evolve toward the same biological morphology. Morphology is a $74 word for form. In other words, he didn't believe evolutionary processes could replicate or could produce duplicate outcomes. This is referred to in biological terms as convergence.

The late Stephen J. Gould argued in his book Wonderful Life that chance is the governing principle of biological evolution at its most rudimentary level. All evolutionary pathways, he argues, are the result of an historical sequence of chance genetic changes/mutations acted upon by natural selection. Therefore, if evolutionary events in the past could be repeated, you'd get a completely different outcome every time. So, evolution's inability to retrace the same path means that it's very unlikely that the same biological and biochemical designs would repeatedly appear in nature, especially in unrelated organisms.

So shouldn't convergence be extremely rare in nature if naturalistic evolution is true? You'd think so. However, convergence is a very common characteristic of life. Amazingly, we see convergence abundantly in nature, and especially in unrelated life forms. Let me give you an example.

I have hated bats since I was a kid. They are scary, and they fly right at you and at the last minute they turn away from you or any object in its path. So when I was a kid walking up the road from my parent's cottage at Lake George at around dusk, I would see these bats flying seemingly all around me so I would duck or pull my hood over my head to "protect" myself. If I just understood how bats navigate, I would have realized that I had nothing to fear. Bats navigate via something called "echolocation", a sort of really cool natural sound/vibration/sonar/radar mechanism. (Don't ask me how it works - I really don't have a clue) What's very cool is that a bat DNA sequence analysis confirms that, from a biological evolutionary perspective, echolocation in bats must have evolved independently (repeated evolution or convergence) in two separate groups of bats: microchiroptera and megachiroptera.

I wasn't sure what the difference was, so I looked it up on Wikipedia. For the most part, microchiroptera (or micro bats) eat insects and have other morphological differences than megachiroptera bats (or mega bats), who mostly eat fruit. All micro bats use echolocation, but most mega bats do not. One mega bat, however, does. Here, let me show you what Wikepedia says about it:

"All microbats use echolocation. The only megabat which is known to echo locate is the genus Rousettus, which uses a different method of echolocation than that used by microbats. The echolocation system of bats is often called bio sonar." (just look up microchiroptera from Wikipedia)

So what are we to make of this? How can evolution repeat itself if it's based upon random chance events? How about this quote from an article by Dr. Fazale Rana, PhD, in which Dr. Rana is explaining the origin of voice replication in hummingbirds, parrots, and songbirds:

"Another recent study, employing behavioral differences in gene expression in brain tissue, has demonstrated that the brain structure of hummingbirds, songbirds, and parrots responsible for vocal learning (the ability to “learn” vocalizations by imitation rather than by instinct) is essentially identical. This is surprising, since these three birds are unrelated to one another. That is, the seven distinct structures in the fore brain of these three groups of birds that are responsible for vocal learning are convergent. From an evolutionary perspective, these structures must have evolved independently of one another on three separate occasions." From Facts for Faith, Issue 4. Here

is the link to his entire article in case you are interested:

http://www.reasons.org/resources/publications/facts-faith/2000issue04#repeatable_evolution_or_repeated_creation

It doesn't stop here folks. Nature is replete with instances of convergence.

From a creationist perspective, it would make perfect sense for an intelligent designer to want to use optimal templates that function well among a vast array of varying life forms. It is analogous to an engineer reusing previously designed templates in different structures, since the design is so elegant and functional = why reinvent the wheel?

No, rather than evolution repeating itself, what you are seeing throughout nature is the use of arch types, of templates of body structures or cell structures which work well in various organisms, developed by a super engineer and artist, the God of the Bible. This is another fingerprint of the Creator who, like an artist, very much must enjoy His work.

Here's another section from my favorite creation account in the Bible: Psalm 104:24-28

²⁴ How many are your works, O LORD!
In wisdom you made them all;
the earth is full of your creatures.

²⁵ There is the sea, vast and spacious,
teeming with creatures beyond number—
living things both large and small.

²⁶ There the ships go to and fro,
and the leviathan, which you formed to frolic there.

²⁷ These all look to you
to give them their food at the proper time.

²⁸ When you give it to them,
they gather it up;
when you open your hand,
they are satisfied with good things.

I'm glad I can't rewind the tape. I wouldn't be much different than I am already. Nature wouldn't be much different either, I would imagine, as nature is the result of a Divine creator, who was and is and is to come, the everlasting One. There's no need to rewind the tape, as it wouldn't matter much anyway.

Please tune in next week as we look at another fingerprint of God which Darwin didn't know much about: molecular machines.

Cya,

Tom