Through the Lens: Evolution, "Homology"

[RickD]

Does Homology prove common descent? Or, can Homology be just as easily considered evidence for a common designer?

Through the Lens: Evolution, "Homology"

[hughfarey]

Once again, Dr Rana is grasping at straws in his attempt to subvert evolution. This time I will simply take a quotation from the course of the video as my text: "You can interpret homology from a creation model perspective just as well as from an evolutionary perspective." Well, no. The pentadactyl limb serves very well as a design for more generalised animals such as primates and insectivores, but it has to be severely modified for most other mammals. Our speaker mentions, for example, dogs, who have modified their thumb to the extent that it is functionally useless in a number of species, and horses, whose pentadactyl design is modified away to a single digit, leaving a vestigial digit halfway up their legs called the chestnut. In fact the majority of pentadactyl based organisms don't, in fact, have five digits at all. It is possible, I agree, that the creator came up with a design that quite clearly didn't work in most cases, and had to modify it more often than not to achieve his divine ends, but it is much more reasonable to suppose that the modifications came about during the course of an evolutionary history. The video concludes: "The evidence that is oftentimes cited in favour of biological evolution can equally be understood from a creation model perspective, and homologies are just one example where that's the case." No. The evidence in favour of biological evolution can be very clearly understood from an evolutionary point of view, but has to be stretched to limits of credulity to fit the concept of a designer applying the same basic design to a variety of independent creations.