Creationist Confusion about pharyngeal homologies

By PZ Myers

Creationists come up with the weirdest criticisms. Serge at Imago Dei disagrees with my claim that humans build their face using "the same embryonic foundation that fish use to build gills", calling them "pharyngeal phantasies". He bases this on the peculiar notion that there ought to be a simple one-to-one mapping of cranial nerves to pharyngeal arches, and that by his understanding of the arrangement, the cranial nerve that innervate the derivatives of the first pharyngeal arch in us (the trigeminal nerve) ought to innervate the first gill arch in teleosts.

These are both false assumptions. I'll explain why.

Continue reading "Creationist Confusion about pharyngeal homologies" (on Pharyngula)