Adaptation, Not Evolution, for Galápagos Finches

Posted by -

People know the story that young Charles Darwin was on the Beagle from 1831 to 1836, appointed to be the ship's naturalist. He discovered evolution by means of natural selection  and thereby revolutionized science. Nice story, but he reworked the already existing concept of natural selection, and never provided evidence for his speculations.

One of the most famous stops was at the Galápagos islands off the coast of Ecuador. He studied finches (not knowing what type of bird they were at the time), and they became icons of evolution. But that is false.

Galápagos finches have been icons of evolution through natural selection. Creationists have long pointed out that this is false, new research agrees.
Galapagos ground finch, Flickr / Judy Gallagher (CC BY 2.0) Poster effect at PhotoFunia and cropped

Charlie thought that all of the finch variations today came from an original pair. These birds have been the subject of many studies over the years. Creationists have pointed out for a long time that they do not show evolution. Studies that get into the genetics show that what is seen is natural — and planned by the Master Engineer. Of course, secularists will not admit to evidence for design in creation, but that is what the evidence reveals.

The evolutionary reasoning that governs much of modern biology speculates that random mutations result in new traits, but evidence for this has been hard to find in the finch DNA. A 2022 study in Science Advances investigated the genomic architecture underlying finch adaptive diversity, which included a comprehensive analysis of DNA sequences associated with such traits as beak and body size.


Researchers discovered that in the small, medium, and large ground finches there were 28 different chromosomal locations (loci) showing strong genetic differences that were statistically correlated with beak and body size. The researchers determined that these loci represented ancestral blocks of DNA whose origins predate the recent adaptive diversification of the finches. In fact, a number of the genes inside the large blocks of DNA were those previously found to be associated with beak development.

To read the full article, journey to "Galápagos Finches: A Case Study in Evolution or Adaptive Engineering?"