One of the challenges to creationism is explaining similarity between different species.
The evolutionary explanation is generally that they are similar because they share a common ancestor. Mind you, the evolutionary inference is not that straightforward since evolutionists also believe that some similarities developed independently.
Alternative creationist explanations include common design and common function. Both have some explanatory value, but they are too generic to account for certain kinds of similarities.
Between about 20-33 min. in this presentation:
Todd Wood reviews the stock explanations, then offers a different proposal. He draws an analogy between genomic modularity and language.
If you compare two texts in same language, they will share many similarities. Is that because they have a common ancestor? Generally, that's not the explanation.
The reason, rather, is that a language has limited characters (alphabet) and limited vocabulary. Likewise, it has a standard syntax. As a result, two texts have many repeated words and grammatical forms.
By analogy, genomic modularities are not homologies. Not intermediates but mosaics.
Wood uses a linguistic analogy, but we could also use a musical analogy. Two composition by different Baroque composers will have many similarities because they employ the same rules of musical composition. A common scale, notation, instruments, musical forms, &c.
No comments:
Post a Comment