Providential discoveries

A German paleontologist recently announced the discovery of a new species of dragonfly with ties to intelligent design, a providential discovery he highlighted by naming the insect for one of ID’s longtime champions.

Gunter Bechly discovered the species in 2011 but had to delay publishing the finding until last month because of other obligations, he wrote on the Discovery Institute’s blog. Until 2009, Bechly accepted neo-Darwinism as settled science. In preparing an exhibit for the museum where he worked in Stuttgart, Germany, he gathered books on intelligent design, intending to discredit them. Instead, he realized they made some good points and adopted their worldview as his own.

The story of how he discovered the new species of dragonfly is equally unlikely. While looking at a website for fossil collectors, he realized one of the specimens came from an early Jurassic dragonfly no one had previously identified among about 6,500 species of fossilized and living dragonflies and damselflies. He contacted the owner to ask if he could borrow and study the well-preserved fossil. What he saw led him to identify detailed characteristics of the insect, some of which it shared with other similar dragonflies from the same time period. Those characteristics met the definition of “homoplasy,” features shared between species but not with any identified common ancestor.

“Such homoplasy is a ubiquitous phenomenon in systematic biology and does not readily align with a hierarchical system required by evolutionary classification,” Bechly wrote. “While surprising from the perspective of common ancestry, such incongruences would not be surprising from the perspective of common design” because a single designer might duplicate characteristics among similar species.

For inspiration in naming the new dragonfly, Bechly turned to the intelligent design books he read years ago. He named the species Chrismooreia michaelbehei after author Michael Behe, the American biochemist who argues the irreducible complexity of nature disproves evolution by random mutations—a possibility Charles Darwin himself conceded.

“His second book, The Edge of Evolution, with its fascinating elaboration of the waiting time problem, had a great influence on my own journey from neo-Darwinism to ID,” Bechly wrote.