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 I took a class on Anthropology last year. It ended up being a very rewarding class. One thing I remember from it was the island of Madagascar, and how it had so many species that are unique to it. The instructor asked the class “don’t you wander how this is possible?” As an Atheist, I already knew the answer was clearly evolution. I knew exactly where she was going to take her lecture. We now know that continental plates exist and shift. We now know that Madagascar was once a part of the African continent that broke off many millions of years ago. And no so mysteriously, there are so many totally different wildlife that are unique only to Madagascar. Well, evolution states that if you isolate a species and let mutation and natural selection do its job, that over millions of years, the species there will naturally evolve. So how does this go up against Creation? 

This is something that Darwin apparently wandered himself. In fact, he devoted two whole chapters on the subject in Origin of Species, except his voyage was to the Galapagos Islands. Darwin happened to stumble upon multiple species of birds that were previously unknown, that could only be found on the islands. However, the majority of the plants and animals found on the harshly volcanic islands bear a resemblance to the ones found on the tropical American continent. The environmental conditions do however closely resemble the conditions found on Cape Verde Islands that are 400 miles west of Africa. Here is a very similar environment to the Galapagos, with completely different flora and fauna. In fact, the species on Cape Verde bear a resemblance to what could be found on the African continent. 

And so Darwin asked: Why would a Creator place two completely different creative stamps, one African and one American, on species that live in nearly identical environments and fill similar ecological niches? He argued that Creationist theory ought to predict that such island species would either be identical or closely allied based on the similar environments that they are supposedly designed to be adapted to. Australia also falls under this category and even the Americas themselves. Before European colonization of the Americas, the New World and Old World had so many distinct species of their own. Even down to primates… 

The Americas had New World monkeys, which are the small little ones with tails that live primarily in trees. Where as the European/Asian/African Old World, only have Old World monkeys: Apes, Orangutans, and Chimps. All with no tails and all lived primarily on the ground. How is it that two sides of the world that have such similar environments (tropical, volcanic, desert, plains, arctic) but have so different plants and animals? How is that isolated places like Australia, the Galapagos, and the Cape Verde Islands can have such unique species. Why, this is something that Creation fails to explain and that only Evolution can explain.

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