I’m finding geology more and more interesting. I used to think of it as the most mundane of all sciences (just a bit below biology:). I have a couple of college textbooks on geology and I am made several attempts to trudge through them though haven’t yet gotten enough motivation. I used to find biology dull, until I realized the reality of the vast history of common descent and then it became fascinating. Discovering the relationships and branching points of families of animals is extremely interesting. I think the same is now happening with geology when I consider the vast history of movement, sediment, metamorphism, mountain building, sea floor spreading, erosion, etc that made the earth the way it looks today.

Okay now to your post. I don’t think very many creationists will be impressed. First of all, “it is still a centipede!” Indeed, the very change you are suggesting is one they like to highlight, degradation of the dna, mutation leading to loss, namely that of pigmentation and eye sight. They would obviously agree that these centipedes are closely related to outside centipedes and show the functionless parts as how our dna is getting more and more corrupt. As for Noah’s Ark, anyone ignorant enough not to understand common descent already will have no problem thinking all modern day centipedes evolved over 4k years from just 2 pairs, I mean they look a lot a like. Plus, I don’t even think it is vogue anymore to put insects on the Ark. I believe in Woodmorappe book he claims that “creeping thing” are only reptiles and all the insects were floating around on vegetation mates. (ad hoc anyone?) . So anyway, it is a non-issue for the modern sophisticated creationist.

But that is not to say biogeography does not strongly evidence common descent and likewise common descent has amazing explanatory power of biogeography. I think you just need to think bigger. Australia is my favorite example. Here is an island that is isolated from the rest of the world for what, 100 million years. The mammals are all marsupial and therefor radiate and fill out the niches that become dominated by placentals on every other landmass. And filling those niches that converge on superficial outward morphology though clearly viewing the bone structure and underlining genetics reveals the history of the descent. Not only that but there is a fossil path through Antartica from south America (dating from the time these land masses were connected) with fossils of … kangaroos?, no, fossils of the most primitive marsupials. This fits common descent perfectly. This makes no sense for all animals leaving the ark at one place, why did only marsupials travel to Australia, and why is there this huge coincidence that they are all genetically more related to each other then their counterpart placental mammals? (sort of like they developed there…hmmmmmm).

But as for that hyper evolution, it would be interesting to see how far creationists do go. I mean, most people are ignorant enough of beetles that they probably group all the many species into one kind without much thought. But what about cat like things. Do they consider lions and tigers one kind? What about house cats. I mean, they are all so similar. I know they consider all dog like things one kind, and spew some absolute nonsense that wolves are the original least degraded of the kind, which degraded into coyotes, and then degraded down to dogs (despite the fact that genetic studies clearly show dogs and wolves share the most recent common ancestor).

Creationists always claim we don’t see one animal turn into enough, revealing off the bat they don’t understand common descent (every child is just a little bit different then any parent. Every alive species diverged from each other, no one species ever became another). But considering the actual form of descent, what I find interesting is that really a whole lot has not changed since we became mammals. Take a look at cats, dogs, bears, their underling bone structure is quite similar, and even we share it. We have eyes, ears, mouth, noses all in the same place. We all have the spine and rib cage, our four limbs and of course the famous mammal arm bone pattern. Looking at the great apes (us included) just at our bones, now we are really similar. Indeed among mammals, are bones are mostly just different sizes and proportions. It has been a 150 million years and we really haven’t diverged that far. The only examples I would exclude would be whales, who lost there back legs (most of the time:), and seriously moved the nose, and us, because we got these awesome brains and consciousness, thank you God.

I’ll have the script for Lesson 15 (Education Series) posted soon for comment.