“Evolution” of Darwin’s Finches Tracked at Genetic Level

Fat, Drunk and Stupid

One thing we can all agree on is that the infamous finches on the Galápagos Islands are a classic icon of evolution. The difference is that evolutionists are playing the fool. Ever since Darwin wondered aloud that if the different types of finches he saw on the Galápagos Islands were not merely variants of a species, but in fact different species, then it “would undermine the stability of species,” and therefore the finches (and everything else) must have spontaneously arisen, evolutionists’ dullness has been embarrassing. Like the co-worker who reveals his ignorance as he rambles on about his pet peeve, evolutionists positivistic proclamations about the finches reveals an astonishing level of ignorance.

Darwin’s findings on the Galápagos Islands told him precisely nothing about how the finches, or anything else for that matter, could spontaneously arise as he would claim. Instead, it was all a silly, eighteenth century, non-scientific, religious argument. God would never create those finches, so they must have evolved.

To this day evolutionists continue to parrot this silly argument as though it has any relevance to modern science. And so not surprisingly, they import their centuries-old, religious views into today’s science, failing to comprehend what it actually means. Witness yesterday’s news item from the leading journal, Nature, which begins:

Researchers are pinpointing the genes that lie behind the varied beaks of Darwin’s finches – the iconic birds whose facial variations have become a classic example of Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection.

A classic example? It is a classic example of how utterly non scientific evolutionary “theory” is. The article discusses particular genes that have been identified as influencing the size and shape of the finch’s beak. And it rehearses the myth that changes that occurred in the finch populations over the course of recent drought years reveal “evolution in action”:

Shifts in this gene underlay an evolutionary change that researchers watched in 2004-05, during a drought that ravaged the Galápagos Islands, where the finches live. The beak sizes of one population of finches shrank, so as to avoid competing for food sources with a different kind of finch – and their genetics changed accordingly.

Of course there was no “evolution in action.” This is evolutionary mythology.

The finch’s beaks altered in response to the drought. The finches were still finches. No new finches arose, and no new beak designs arose.

This is not a story of random mutations luckily finding a new, improved, design that was then fixed in the population via natural selection. Preexisting genes influenced preexisting beak designs in preexisting finch species. And when the drought ceased the populations cycled back to their pre drought designs. New designs were not created.

But that is the science, and evolution never was about the science. Evolutionist’s on-going claims about the Galápagos finches are non scientific and, frankly, ridiculous. The finches truly are a classic icon of evolution. They don’t reveal a case of evolution in action, but rather evolutionary thought in action.