The only other solution is a designer for each and every species, designers that are never allowed to talk to one another or share trade secrets.
It's even more insane than that. To explain the nested hierarchies, the designers must have been working in committees or with subcontractors.
The vertebrate committee designed the basic vertebrate design, then broke up into the fish subcommittee, the reptile subcommittee, and the mammal subcommittee.
The mammal subcommittee designed the basic mammal plan, then subcontracted out whales to one group, bats to another, primates to still another, and so on.
The bat guys were intrigued by one of the reptile group's bird designs and so tried to make their own, but were constrained by the overall mammal design that they had to work with.
I do agree, though, that common features do
not imply a common designer -- the
pattern of similarities seems to imply a nested hierarchy of committees of designers.
Maybe that's what Genesis meant when God said, "let
us make humans in
our image?"
Speaking personally, I find few things more awesome than contemplating this vast and majestic process of evolution, the ebb and flow of successive biotas through geological time. Creationists and others who cannot for ideological or religious reasons accept the fact of evolution miss out a great deal, and are left with a claustrophobic little universe in which nothing happens and nothing changes.
--
M. Alan Kazlev