> He would have had to go out of his way to deliberately replicate code just to make it look like evolution had occurred.

This is kind of skewed reasoning, thinking of God in human terms. Nothing is "out of his way" for God to do. Create the universe or light a match; one's about as labor-intensive as the other.

Moreover, it's even flawed in human terms. I was trying to think of a good analogy, and forgive me that the best I could come up with was PokerBot. The easiest way for me to write PokerBot (a computer program that runs in RinkChat and conducts poker games, supporting many different poker variants) was to first code in a base class, which contained all the functionality that would make it easy to build upon to write a suite of individual variants. So I built in code for different types of initial bets, for example -- antes, bring-ins, and blinds. No variant yet uses all three, but it's easier to build in all three up front, to support whatever combinations I might want to use down the road.

Each variant, then is derived from this base class -- or one of the other variants -- and the only coding I do is to write in what things make that variant distinct. My code for Omaha says to deal four initial cards and to evaluate hands at the end a little weirdly, but otherwise it's just "do what Texas Hold'Em does." When the object is built at runtime, the code for antes and bring-ins and double boards and all that IS THERE, but totally unused.

It would be *more* work to build Omaha up from scratch, even if I did it by copying the common pieces from other variants where I'd already written them.

My silly analogy is, I'm sure, not any more of an accurate representation of the way God thinks and works. But it illustrates the point that the minimal ground-up work required to accomplish a particular task -- whether accomplished by an intelligent being or not -- isn't always the simplest or most natural way to get it done.