Leave it to Eric Metaxas at Breakpoint to turn the latest research on the octopus genome into an amusing, illuminating, lucidly understandable radio-commentary takedown of Darwinian theory — in less than 4 minutes. Go here and listen to (or read) today’s program.
Eric draws on our work at Evolution News, including Casey Luskin’s post “The Octopus Genome: Not ‘Alien’ but Still a Big Problem for Darwinism.” Metaxas makes the excellent point that for all the trouble the Cambrian explosion poses for Darwinism (see Stephen Meyer’s Darwin’s Doubt), living animals pose no less a dilemma.
The problem with convergent evolution is that it asks us to believe that through a series of fortunate events, repeated in multiple species and environments, strikingly similar biological features arose. Isn’t this phenomenon “just a fancy way of saying a miracle happened twice”? An example is the octopus and us, sharing some notable features — “camera eyes,” for example — that must have been obtained via a route other than shared ancestry.
Yes, Darwinism assumes a common ancestor for all life but no one thinks these things were derived that way. They sprung into existence independently.

“Convergent evolution” is all over nature, from powered flight evolving three times to each continent having its own version of the anteater. Think about that. As one delightfully un-self-conscious “Science Today” cover put it, convergent evolution is “nature discover[ing] the same design over and over.” Well, good for nature!
But as Luskin argues, there’s a better explanation for a tentacled mollusk having a mammal’s brain and human eyes. And that explanation is common design by an intelligent Engineer. And like all good engineers, this this one reused some of His best designs.
Now that explanation isn’t going to satisfy Darwinian naturalists. And they’ll probably keep on invoking “convergent evolution” when faced with impossible coincidences in nature.

The Breakpoint website says it goes out to “1,000 outlets by an estimated audience of over 2 million.” Nice! Taking something complex and expressing it briefly in way that comprehensible to anyone is a gift, alright.
Image credit: Elias Levy (Blue-Ringed Octopus) [CC BY 2.0], via Wikimedia Commons.