The Comic That Frustrates All Creationists

Send it to your Darwin-hating uncle!

The new species on oceanic islands that led Darwin to the theory of evolution still provide an unbeatable argument today

In a prior post, I detailed some of the key observations that a young Charles Darwin made on his voyage around the world that led him to the theory of evolution:

How Darwin Really, Truly Solved the Mystery of Life

I received some nice comments on the post—and the obligatory digs from the intelligent design crowd. It’s especially clear that the latter really don’t like Darwin, so I thought it might be helpful to produce a simplified comic of one of his more compelling discoveries to confirm that his conclusion is irresistible.

During his trip around the world on the H.M.S. Beagle, Darwin became quite familiar with the facts of island biogeography listed in the first three panels below. And this new information led him to the conclusion stated in the fourth panel.

Please feel free to share this with your favorite creationist

What is important here is that the premises that Darwin relies on are easy-to-understand facts that no one can or does dispute. And this, in turn, naturally implies the transformation of species over time. Those who challenge Darwin’s On the Origin of Species should have to confront these points. To paraphrase and add more detail to the comic above:

1. Since volcanic islands form in the middle of oceans, plants and animals have to reach them by crossing wide marine barriers.

2. Species on oceanic islands also tend to be endemic (or particular) to those islands—appearing nowhere else in the world (e.g., the marine iguanas of Galápagos or Hawaii’s colorful birds known as honeycreepers).

3. Yet these new island species tend to most closely resemble—but are not identical to—plants and animals from the nearest continent. For example, the iguanas and finches of Galápagos resemble the iguanas and finches of South America. Still, these island taxa are their own species and have clearly differentiated from their continental counterparts.

4. So how did this happen? Darwin came up with the only reasonable answer. Obviously, a small group of iguanas, finches, etc., on Galápagos originally reached the islands from South America—and then… well, they had to change. They had to transform from the types of iguanas and finches¹ he saw in South America into these new Galápagan species that inhabit the islands today.

What other reasonable explanation is there?

Has God been continuing to enact miracles of creation on volcanic islands emerging from the sea? And does God, for some reason, favor great dispersers when seeding these islands with new life—great dispersers that resemble forms on the nearest continent? Indeed, in 2023, volcanic eruptions led to a new island off the coast of Japan. If we set up cameras on this newest bit of land, will we be able to capture something like the first few paragraphs of Genesis going on there?

Or is it possible that the marine iguanas of Galápagos had existed throughout South America—and then after a small group ended up rafting to the islands, they disappeared from all of South America? Well, there are 13 species of finches on the archipelago—all endemic to the island chain. Did individuals of each species randomly get blown out to the archipelago—and then, soon after they landed, did the rest of their species then vanish from the continent? Did this really occur 13 times? Consider that Cape Verde has 369 endemic species of insects—and that Hawaii had at least 51 endemic species of honeycreepers, including their famous nectar sippers with their long-curved bills used to reach the sweet liquid at the bottom of elongated flowers.

Did all 51 of these honeycreeper species migrate en masse from Asia, flying thousands of miles into the middle of the Pacific? And then did all individuals of these 51 species that remained in Asia vanish without a trace? To consider such questions is to answer them.

And once you understand that the 13 species of Galápagos finches all descend from a common ancestor, and all 51 species of Hawaii’s honeycreepers descend from a common ancestor, and all dog breeds descend from a common ancestor, you now understand the basic idea behind Darwin’s discovery—or, at the very least, you can see evolutionary family trees. For just as all dogs descend from a common ancestor, so too do all members of the canid family—wolves, coyotes, foxes, jackals; and same with all the meat-eating families of the order Carnivora— Canidae (dogs, wolves, foxes), Felidae (cats, lions, tigers), Ursidae (bears), Procyonidae (raccoons), Mustelidae (weasels, otters), Mephitidae (skunks), Viverridae (civets), Herpestidae (mongooses), Hyaenidae (hyenas), Otariidae (sea lions), Phocidae (true seals), and Odobenidae (walrus). And same goes with all mammals, etc.

What is more, all canids—wolves, coyotes, foxes, jackals, etc.—diverged from each other for the same reason the finches of Galápagos did: Temporary geographic isolation forced them to confront different environments. This led to different selective pressures that favored certain features over others, resulting in slight modifications in populations. Over many generations, these minor differences would accrue and create increasingly more substantial divergences.

Importantly, Darwin developed the theory of evolution to explain his grand discovery of the striking geographic distributions of life on earth—that continuous organic thread running throughout the world’s landscapes, stretching uninterrupted through space and time. His view answers why species that most resemble each other physically are essentially always close to each other geographically—like grizzly bears and polar bears in the far north, or emperor penguins and king penguins in the far south, or giant sequoias and coast redwoods in California, or all the species of finches on Galápagos.

Coda

On his trip around the world, Darwin realized that the only way to answer the biogeographical questions with which he was confronted was not with natural theology but through a theory of evolution. Two species of the same genus that appear so much alike are related through a recent common ancestor, and this ties them to a common birthplace. The dominant distributional pattern of life on Earth, which suggests a general proportional relationship between taxonomic and geographical distance, is precisely what you would expect if all organisms were descended from the same ancestor. But the theological viewpoint, unconstrained by the unifying and co-locating processes of heredity, could not explain this distributional pattern. In On the Origin of Species, Darwin returned to the question of Galápagos and Cape Verde organisms and answered the problem he had stated many years earlier in his journal. Why did the new species of plants and animals on oceanic islands so clearly resemble the species and plants from the nearest continent? Obviously, they must be related:

The inhabitants of the Cape de Verde Islands are related to those of Africa, like those of the Galápagos to America. I believe this grand fact can receive no sort of explanation on the ordinary view of independent creation; whereas on the view here maintained, it is obvious that the Galápagos Islands would be likely to receive colonists, whether by occasional means of transport or by formerly continuous land, from America; and the Cape de Verde Islands from Africa; and that such colonists would be liable to modifications; the principle of inheritance still betraying their original birthplace.

As he traveled around the world, Darwin was able to observe this same geographical current of organic relationships, running from region to region. Today, such patterns are obvious to those who know to look for them: They confront us frequently and perpetually throughout the normal course of our lives, helping distinguish biogeography from nearly all other subjects. Most of us do not typically encounter fossils or observe the workings of embryology or come across many of the other well-known indications of evolution. Nor do we often meet with reminders of the efficacy of other scientific theories, say, plate tectonics or the molecular theory of gases or Maxwell's theory of the electromagnetic field. Most scientific models and principles follow from facts that require specialized knowledge and have been determined through careful investigation. But the distributional consequences of evolution are visible to practically everyone just through casual observation. Darwin noted in his summarial chapter in Origin of Species that some of the biogeographical facts he detailed "must have struck every traveler." But consider the effect such observations would have on those already familiar with his arguments. No evidence will ever fetch the true believers, but the probative value of distributions may at least help enlighten a few now bewildered by the intelligent design debate. To people familiar with biogeography, every visit to a national park or vacation in the Caribbean or hike in the mountains will continue to provide new and vibrant testimony to the Darwinian bond between life and Earth. The theory of evolution thus no longer remains distant and abstract; it becomes integrated into one's world view in the same visceral way that the mechanics of anatomy become a part of a surgeon.

As the facts of heredity demand, all organisms on this planet are physically linked through a material stream of genes that has flowed without interruption for billions of years from a single ancestral source. Those who truly grasp this enjoy a world decorated by striking floristic and faunal patterns, all serving to illuminate the secret behind life and the grandeur of Darwin's discovery. Those who deny evolution move through a fractured and irrational biotic world, devoid of organic relation and marked only by chaos and dim miracles. We should endeavor to close this gap. Biogeography, once a secret delicacy enjoyed only by geniuses, must now be elevated from its current obscurity and placed alongside literature and history as an indispensable component of a truly enlightened education.²

1. As I was reminded, by a creationist no less, the “Galápagos finches” are not true finches, but are tanagers—a group closely related to cardinals. The closest relatives to the “Galápagos finches” are Central American grassquits. But the point remains. It is a flock of grassquits that ended up marooned on Galápagos and from this one population, all 13 species of “Darwin’s finches” are descended.

2. The coda is from Here Be Dragons