More Peeks at Darwin’s Beaks

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When Darwin went to the Galapagos Islands off the coast of Ecuador, he noticed that island finches had developed a variety of beak sizes, and he speculated on how that happened. His observations influenced his later development of evolutionary theory, including the teaching that one animal evolves into another.


In 2005 a research group that had been studying Galapagos finches for about 30 years declared that they had actually observed evolutionary beak changes occurring in the wild.1 Because Darwin did not have 30 years of observation and could only speculate, this new study led to blaring headlines, like “Darwin was right.”2

However, the change observed in finch beaks is not evolution at all, it is simply adaptation. Adaptation by an organism to its environment is a God-designed mechanism and can occur rapidly (as it did after Noah’s Flood, to give rise to all the species today). No genetic information has been added to produce the beaks’ change. Adaptations can be seen throughout the animal kingdom, but it shows that 
Darwin was not right.

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Footnotes

  1. Science, 313(5784):224–226, July 14, 2006.
  2. Los Angeles Times, p. A-21, July 15, 2006.

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