Darwin’s finches turn out to be simply races of the same bird. No speciation involved:
Lee Spetner on Darwin’s iconic finches
 Further to What’s happened since Icons of Evolution (2002)? Well, for one thing, Darwin’s textbook finches took a beating ( no speciation)
From The Evolution Revolution by physicist Lee Spetner:
The proximate biochemical signal evoking the change in beak shape [of Galapagos finches] has been discovered to be a protein growth factor Bmp4. The more Bmp4 that is made, the broader and deeper is the bird’s beak. This protein acts as a signal to the development of the craniofacial bones which determines the beak’s shape. If my suggestion is correct that the hormones triggered by environmental inputs affect embryonic development, then those hormones induce these growth factors to form the finch beak….The built-in mechanism of the NREH [Non Random Evolutionary Hypothesis] enables the bird population to adapt to a new environment quickly and efficiently without having to call upon the slow and wasteful neo-Darwinian process of random mutation and natural selection. p. 76
Note from reader:
Spetner’s Non Random Evolutionary Hypothesis proposes that certain genetic traits lie dormant within the genomes of various living things until environmental cues turn them on and they appear in the next generation. In other words, living things are front loaded with a host of options which allow for rapid and specified adaptations for various enviroments. There is neither chance nor selection in this process. Moreover, it also accounts for the rapid return of smaller finch beaks when the drought ceases. It points towards exquisite design and accounts for the variability of Darwin’s finches without invoking the confusions of natural selection. If mutations are random, why is it that thicker, larger beaks appear reliably with every drought on the Galapagos Islands? Why don’t longer tail feathers or unusual colors appear? If natural selection works slowly and imperfectly, why are the changes in beak size so rapid? If the mutations are embedded in the genomes of the birds, why do they disappear so quickly when conditions change?
Here for more on Spetner’s The Evolution Revolution.
http://www.uncommondescent.com/evolution/lee-spetner-on-darwins-iconic-finches/
Lee Spetner October 9, 2015 at 1:31 pm
bFast, Bob O’H
The experiment has already been done with finches. Here is a quote from my book The Evolution Revolution:
“… in a controlled study, finches were introduced to an island that previously had no finches (Conant 1988, Pimm 1988). In 1967, about 100 identical finches were removed from a U.S. Government Bird Reservation in the middle of the Pacific Ocean and were taken about 300 miles away to a group of four small atolls lying within less than ten miles of each other, which had no native finches. The birds were released onto one of these islands, and they soon spread to all of them. Seventeen years later, when the birds were first checked, they were found to have a variety of bill shapes and to be adapted — both by their behavior and by their bill shapes and associated muscles — to various niches. This was a speeded- up form of the conventional scenario of Galapagos finch evolution. In seventeen years, and possibly less, the finches had diversified into various niches.”
For the effect of Bmp4 on other birds see
Wu, P., T.-X. Jiang, S. Suksaweang, R. B. Widelitz and C.-M. Chuong (2004) Molecular Shaping of the Beak. Science 305(5689): 1465–1466. |
