What Your Atheist Professor Doesn't Know (But Should)

by Stephen Joseph Williams

the same features showing up in unrelated creatures, despite the possibility of myriad choices of evolutionary “pathways” which presumably could be (or could have been) taken. There is no known force which would constrain all of these wildly diverse pathways into the same ending, yet there they are. Since Darwinism is thought to be a “contingent” (non-restricted) process, -- i.e. it shouldn’t tend to go the same way twice -- this has puzzled inquiring minds. Many respected biologists (like the late Stephen Jay Gould, and Simon Conway-Morris) have noted that it’s bizarre that unguided Darwinian evolution would ever have gone down the same mutational paths more than once, or arrived at the same structure more than once, in unrelated creatures.