ove to be the key to unravelling phyletic relationships in Phylum Gasolinolophyta. The most primitive carburetor ever described was found in a fossil near Allentown, Pennsylvania, and dated to the year 1899; this rare species relied on a wooden wick that delivered fuel to the cylinder by capillary action. Indeed, many other increasingly complex features can be documented in the fossil remains of carburetors, but these often emerge simultaneously in numerous distinct phyletic lines. The attempt to unravel the phylogeny of the Phylum Gasolinolophyta on the basis of carburetor evolution has been frustrated over and over again by parallel developments, a phenomenon known as ``convergent evolution.'' The most recent example in carriage history is the sudden appearance of fuel injection as a replacement for more conventional carburetion in numerous independent classes and families of Phylum Gasolinolophyta. This amazing evolutionary jump involves the precise metering of fuel for each cylinder and thus provides a means of insuring that the ideal air-fuel ratio is being burned in the engine. It also eliminates cylinder-to-cylinder variations and the tendency of cylinders more remote from the carburetor to receive less fuel than is desired. A variety of metering and control systems have evolved, with a continuous-flow system first appearing in a fossil from 1957. The selective advantages for all these parallel systems were evidently great enough to produce this striking example of convergent evolution, or, to word it slightly differently, the selection pressure was great enough to cause different classes and families of gasoline powered autolocomotes to all evolve in this direction.
E. Type of starter: Another striking evolutionary advance in the development of autolocomote fauna is the electric starter. No one quesitons that the primitive hand-crank type of starter at some point must have evolved into the far more sophisticated electrical starter, yet the origin of this device is obscure. The fossil Duryea crank has been dated to 1892-93, and it clearly shows a one-cylinder gasoline engine with electric ignition installed in a second-hand carriage. This fossil has caused quite a stir for its obviously endosymbiotic engine on the one hand, yet its totally anomalous occurrence with an electric starter long before such starters were thought to have evolved. The next fossil evidence for electrical ignition occurs in 1912, after which it rapidly proliferates throughout all classes of the Phylum Gasolinolophyta. Similar to the carburetor, the strong selection pressures evidently produced convergent evolution of the electric starter in at least five or six major classes initially, so that this feature has not proven to be a useful criterion in establishing a comprehensive phylogeny for the entire phylum.
The Parable Applied:
Doesn't the discussion above seem ludicrous? Isn't this because you already know that automobiles did not evolve in the sense that most biologists feel plants and animals did? For automobiles we know that the similarities between different models are the result of common design - whether using off-the-shelf components in new vehicles, or of adapting an existing feature to a different purpose, or even of maintaining a certain stylistic similarity within a particular make of auto for several years running. Thus similar structures sometimes appear in vehicles otherwise very different because they were put there by the designer.
What you may not realize is that this feature also occurs among living things. Again and again we find the same sort of problem (illustrated above for self-starters and number of wheels or cylinders) cropping up in the case of eyesight and flight among animals, or in photosynthesis and nutrient transport among plants, to name just a few cases. Evolutionists must repeatedly invoke the idea of "convergent evolution" to explain this - that somehow two or more independent, lengthy series of random mutations produced nearly identical designs. Is it really scientific to just assume that the rate and 