How Animals Evolved

One of the most common arguments against Intelligent Design (ID) is that animals do not have minds or intelligence. The argument for Intelligent Design (ID) is usually that there must be a Creator because all the animals share a similar brain and nose with humans, cats, dogs, dolphins, and birds. But what I find even more disturbing about the intelligent design arguments for creation is that the “intelligent” animals are of less interest to creationists than the animals that are more fundamental to life itself. It should be noted that Intelligent Design is just one part of creationism. If you look deep enough into the claims of creationism, you’ll find that it claims to be the only explanation for all of the existing life on Earth, and the fact that humans are not the only creatures that have minds and brains like animals.

Insects are a good example of how evolution did not bring animals to be as we see them today. Insects are a very good example of convergent evolution. Convergent Evolution means that animals and insects that look alike developed first, then later branches of the same family diverged from a common ancestor. Insects are one example of convergent evolution. In fact, it has been argued that bees could have evolved into flying insects independently, given the similarities between the head of the modern honeybee and the head of a flying insect.

Another example of convergent evolution is through asexual reproduction. Asexual reproduction involves a process where an organism uses a set of eggs to form asexually reproducing reproductive system. Animals like trichomonas (chicken) reproduce this way, while other animals (such as fish and crabs) reproduce via a different set of eggs and asexually (that is, they lay their eggs to be fertilized by another animal). A recent study by palaeontologists suggest that dinosaurs may have used asexual reproduction to rapidly increase their numbers in the early Cretaceous geological period.