To Converge or Not to Converge, That is the Question!

By Emily Willoughby, ([email protected], emilywilloughby.com) – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=39933328

Just some interesting tidbits from my dinosaur class today. It turns out that “technically” speaking, a dinosaur must have several traits, including a perforated acetabulum, in order for it to be called a “dinosaur.”

The following article has been reblogged with permission from Creation Unfolding. The views expressed reflect those of the author, and not necessarily represent those of the New Creation.

The possession of a perforated acetabulum (open hip socket), as seen here, is a key feature that distinguishes dinosaurs from other animals.

As I was researching this character trait, I found out that Scansoriopteryx [Editor’s note: it’s close relative, Yi qi, can be seen in the image above] and Anchiornis, both “advanced” theropods (in the sense that they have feathers and appear about “80 million years” after the first dinosaurs in the fossil record), do not have fully perforated acetabulums! So, does that mean they are, “technically speaking,” not dinosaurs?

The secular scientific community will say that this is an instance of “convergence,” where two completely separate taxa “evolve” the same feature (in this instance, a non-perforated acetabulum). That means that their ancestors had a perforated acetabulum, but then lost this trait.

Yet could it be that this is how they were created? Convergence occurs on a regular basis in phylogenetic cladistics. The problem I have with the convergence of characters is this: how do we know that other character-traits, presently used to classify an organism’s evolutionary ancestry, are actually derived, evolved features? Is it possible they are not evolved features, but instead are instances of convergence? If so, what does that do to ancestry?


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robert byers
robert byers
March 30, 2022 6:26 PM

Amen and Amen. Exactly. Thats the equation. One would never know if convergence happened or a natural evolving trait! So everything in evolutionists historys of biology would never be sure or mean anything. You could wax eloquent on the options for how anything evolved. IN reality they HAVE TO invoke convergence to make sense of what they find. they invoke it to explain marsupials, though I insist marsupials are just placentals with pouches for certain local reasons This creationist also denies there were dinosaurs and the theropod dinos are just big flightless ground birds..indeed even creationists must deal with theropods having wishbones and bodyplans that justify the artists depiction here of this bird looking dino. Convergence ideas in evolution however make it look unlikely they have any evidence for any evolution of creatures excepting summing up traits.

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