Question

Contrast the hypotheses that biogeographers conducting research in either 1918 or 2018, respectively, would use to explain the distribution of closely related plants and animals in South America, Africa, and Australia.

Answer 1

Biogeography -the study of the distributions of plants and animals

If plants and animals had developed over millions of years then we would suppose closely related species to be living close together geographically.

1. Though, this distribution of animals is also what we would expect following the Genesis Flood.
2. Birds would have spread from the Middle East (where the Ark landed) with some eventually settling on the Galápagos Islands.
3. Consequent variation and natural selection among the descendants of these finches would then have occurred because they had the inbuilt genetic capacity to change quickly, so as to adapt to different environments—somewhat that seems to be a biological design feature.
4. The same thing would have happened with the first fruit flies and snails to reach the Hawaiian Islands (perhaps on drifting log mats). These would also have diversified as they adapted to the different conditions.

Different distributions

Though, related plants and animals are frequently found on different continents, separated by large sections of land or ocean.

This design is not anything you would expect if they slowly evolved over millions of years, but is steady with the scriptural account of creation and the global Flood.

Example, many similar plant and animal groups are found around the land bordering oceans. This is such a consistent pattern that migration and transportation seems a much better explanation for biogeography than evolution.

CONTRAST the hypotheses

Evolution	Example of differ from biogeographic
Evolutionists occasionally try to clarify disjunct distributions by continental drift. They say that the continents split apart millions of years ago, and when they did, similar species of plants and animals that once lived side by side were separated . This is the explanation given, for example, as to why chironomid midges, which are like small flies, or gnats, are found in Antarctica, Southern Australia, South America, New Zealand and South Africa	1.For example, South America and Africa allegedly separated around 100 million years ago, but species of cactus, which supposedly evolved in South America around 30 million years ago, are also found in Africa. In the same way, the evolutionary accounts of the emergence of rodents found in South America and Africa do not fit the generally accepted timing of continental drift Many other puzzling disjunctions across these continents are known, such as those of cichlid fish, which are freshwater species. Another problem is that disjunct species are frequently found on continents that were never joined together
	2.For example, many plants and insects are known to be disjunct across the Pacific Ocean. The distribution of the plant genus, Clethra. Interestingly, the opossum, Dromiciops, found in Chile, is much closer to Australian marsupials than to other South American marsupials
Other biogeographic anomalies abound that do not fit the expected evolutionary pattern	1.For example, the animal species of central and southern Africa are closer to those of southern Asia than those of northern Africa. The plants found in Madagascar are remarkably similar to those of Indonesia. Crowberries (Empetrum) are found only in the more northern regions of the northern hemisphere and in the most southern regions of the southern hemisphere