{"id":4721,"date":"2025-07-03T08:43:05","date_gmt":"2025-07-03T12:43:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/js1cd06kre.onrocket.site\/?p=4721"},"modified":"2025-07-03T08:43:05","modified_gmt":"2025-07-03T12:43:05","slug":"darwins-finches","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/2025\/07\/03\/darwins-finches\/","title":{"rendered":"Darwin’s Finches"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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To listen to today’s reflection as a podcast,\u00a0<\/em>click here<\/a>

As a naturalist, Charles Darwin wasn\u2019t much of a \u201cbird guy.\u201d

His real fascination was with barnacles.

He spent eight years of his life, in fact, painstakingly dissecting smelly samples from all over the world, piling up storage crates in his London study in the pre-refrigeration era. His hope was to discover why barnacles were not all the same, and how various species might have come into existence.

We have no record of what Mrs. Darwin thought of this hobby. But we do know that their son George, when visiting a friend\u2019s house, was flabbergasted not to find a study with a microscope. He asked his friend, \u201cThen where does your father look at his<\/em> barnacles?\u201d

During his five weeks visiting the Galapagos Islands during 1835, Darwin dutifully shot and preserved a number of small finch-like birds. But he didn\u2019t really notice anything overly interesting about them, and even failed to record which of the specific islands where they had been found. That turned out to be a serious oversight.

It was only later, with the help of an ornithological colleague back in England, that it became clear these birds were closely related to each other \u2013 yet different. They sported a fascinating variety of beaks. And that might mean something.

Darwin and his followers ultimately grasped that those different mouthpieces might be adaptations<\/em> \u2013 presumably accrued over a very long period of time \u2013 that specifically equipped particular finch species to dine on the vegetation available only at specific locations.

Even though there is no mention of the Galapagos finches in The Origin of Species<\/em>, his 1859 landmark case for evolution, these small birds have gradually become iconic representations of \u201cnatural selection,\u201d Darwin\u2019s proposed mechanism for how living things are able to differentiate into other living things without the intervention of a Creator.

There are 17 species of Darwin\u2019s finches on the islands. They are all \u201cendemic\u201d \u2013 found nowhere else on the planet.

Two biologists, Peter and Rosemary Grant, devoted 30 years of their lives to studying which beaks belong to which finches on which islands. Jonathan Weiner won the 1995 Pulitzer Prize for The Beak of the<\/em>Finch<\/em>, his riveting account of their research.

I saw a number of Darwin\u2019s finches during my visit to the Galapagos last week.

They are tiny, energetic, and easy to overlook. \u201cDrab\u201d is the word I would use \u2013 a mishmash of grays and browns that make them look a lot like the sparrows that are probably nesting near your house or apartment right now.

It\u2019s fascinating how these small birds are now regarded as ironclad proof that living things grow and change and evolve all by themselves<\/em>, without any outside help or direction.

Is 100% naturalistic evolution a demonstrated fact? \u201cOf course,\u201d say a great many scientists. \u201cJust look at Darwin\u2019s finches.\u201d

\u201cIt is absolutely safe to say that if you meet somebody who claims not to believe in evolution, that person is ignorant, stupid, or insane.\u201d So says Oxford biologist Richard Dawkins. Berkeley law professor Philip Johnson adds, \u201cEqual time for creation-science in biology classes, the Darwinists like to say, is like equal time for the theory that it is the stork that brings babies.\u201d

Here we need to pause and acknowledge that \u201cevolution,\u201d if defined as \u201cchange with respect to time,\u201d is clearly happening. And it\u2019s easy to verify. The whole world held its breath during the COVID-19 pandemic as an uncounted number of viruses morphed into ever-more-resistant strains of that life-threatening disease. Bacterial evolution has likewise been so effective at doing end runs around antibiotics that it\u2019s almost put penicillin on the shelf.

But that\u2019s not proof that \u201cevolution,\u201d when proposed as an all-encompassing, mindless, impersonal, directionless process, has somehow been able to generate the mind-boggling complexity of Earth\u2019s living systems.

For one thing, scientists have never observed the birth of a new species, even though a number of researchers are trying very hard to make that happen (which, if in fact they succeed, wouldn\u2019t actually count as a \u201cnaturalistic, all-by-itself\u201d development).

Perhaps that\u2019s not fair. Every Darwinist assumes that evolutionary progress requires an extraordinary amount of time.

But it\u2019s exceedingly difficult to see how even millions of tiny genetic mutations, sorted out by the ruthless survival-of-the-fittest mechanism of natural selection, can produce something as exquisite as an eye. Or a wing. Or a human brain, with its trillions of neurons required for you to read and understand this sentence.

The late biologist Stephen Jay Gould, whose worldview contemplated no role for a Cosmic Designer, nevertheless grasped that classic Darwinism could not explain the sudden appearance of entirely new lifeforms in the fossil record.

\u201cWhat good is 5% of an eye?\u201d he mused. No one has been able to explain how the gradual evolution of complex systems could actually happen, or why it might provide a survival advantage.

Therefore Gould proposed the theory of \u201cpunctuated equilibrium\u201d (or \u201cpunk eke\u201d) \u2013 a fancy way of saying that somehow, for reasons yet unknown, evolution suddenly makes quantum leaps. A fish becomes a land-roving creature. A lizard grows feathers or fur.

Gould\u2019s Darwinist colleagues have cried \u201cheresy!\u201d But that\u2019s not the same thing as explaining the almost complete absence of transitional fossils.

Evolutionary scientist Jeffrey H. Schwartz acknowledges that the major animal groups \u201cappear in the fossil record as Athena did from the head of Zeus \u2013 fully blown and raring to go.\u201d

Darwin himself, as a good scientist, states in The Origin of Species<\/em> that evolution as an explanatory thesis must rise or fall on the evidence. Thousands of so-called \u201cmissing links\u201d will have to turn up. So far, after more than a century and a half of digging, paleontologists have unearthed only a handful of candidates.

In 1959, on the 100th<\/sup> anniversary of Darwin\u2019s signature work, it nevertheless seemed his picture of reality was destined to be upheld as something close to certainty.

In the 21st<\/sup> century, however, even some former fans are asking out loud: Is Darwinism based on a fair assessment of the scientific evidence\u2026or has it become simply another kind of philosophical fundamentalism?<\/em>

Can followers of Jesus believe in evolution? Of course. The evidence is compelling that biological systems have changed, and are still changing, with respect to time.

But should that same evidence lead us to conclude that life emerged all by itself from non-life, that order sprang from chaos, and that complex systems self-assembled from simple parts \u2013 all without any external Source of information, design, purpose, or power?

We live in a day and age when the evidence provided by scientific research hardly rules out a Creator.

Reality makes far more sense, in fact, when the God Hypothesis is given its due.

In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus says, \u201cLook at the birds of the air. They do not sow or reap or store away in barns, yet your heavenly Father feeds them\u201d (Matthew 6:26-27).

Even Darwin\u2019s finches are sustained by the Creator that Darwin\u2019s hypothesis seems to deny. \u00a0
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

To listen to today’s reflection as a podcast,\u00a0click here As a naturalist, Charles Darwin wasn\u2019t much of a \u201cbird guy.\u201d His real fascination was with barnacles. He spent eight years of his life, in fact, painstakingly dissecting smelly samples from all over the world, piling up storage crates in his London study in the pre-refrigeration era. His hope was to… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":4722,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[951,217,722,249],"class_list":["post-4721","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-charles-darwin","tag-creation","tag-evolution","tag-naturalism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4721","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4721"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4721\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4723,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4721\/revisions\/4723"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4722"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4721"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4721"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4721"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}