|
But, why would god's magic automatically create a meal that looks like it came from real plants? There are many connections in the way organisms work internally. Patterns of characteristics never overlap; you never get fish with wings because wings evolved after fish (if you get them, it's cause of convergent evolution), but you do get whales and snakes with atavistic legs, because those genes may still be hanging around their DNA. There are literally thousands and thousands of characteristics like this, that can all be sampled independently; using this sampling organisms can be put into clades (trees of descent). These can be based on many, many characteristics of the species: appearance & physical features (shape of leg, skull, lungs, existence of various organs, etc), mutation rates of mitochondrial dna, their appearance and geographical extent from fossils. You can create clades of all major species based on any one of these, and the amazing thing is that ALL of them match up! So if god just created a random new animal, there would be thousands of variables he would have to take into account of to preserve this characteristic - not all of which we even know yet. (This property was noticed before we were able to detect most of the more sophisticated ways of measuring these differences, but it's always come true. And there could still be more out there - for example maybe you could use the dna of undiscovered internal bacteria of mammals to derive an evolutionary history, and it would have to match up). So God would have to do tons of extra work to match all these up - and the questions then is, why would he match all the other stuff up too? |