Crash Landing

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International news outlets proclaimed headlines like “Butterfly unlocks evolution secret.”1

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Heliconius heurippa

Photo courtesy Christian Salcedo, University of Florida Gainsville

A live specimen of Heliconius heurippa resulting from the mating of H. cydno and H. melpomene.

Such articles reported a study in Nature,2 which claimed that a new South American butterfly (Heliconius heurippa) had been successfully created.

Consider this: Scientists have used time and money to produce this hybrid in a lab. This hybrid required intelligence, not the chance actions seen in nature. In addition, scientists simply produced a butterfly by interbreeding two butterflies; such hybridization is just variation within the butterfly kind and is in accord with the creation model. Lastly, this is not evolution in a progressive sense because no new genetic information has been produced in the process.

This example fails to fly for the evolutionary belief system.

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January – March 2007

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Footnotes

  1. news.bbc.co.uk/go/em/fr/-/2/hi/science/nature/4708459.stm.
  2. Mavárez, J., Salazar, et al., Speciation by hybridization in Heliconius butterflies, Nature 441(7095):868–871, June 16, 2006.

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