The Crazy Rafting Iguanas

Choosing to believe Darwinism
and Deep Time requires accepting
“crazy” notions like rafting iguanas

“That they reached Fiji directly from North America seems crazy.”

But Jimmy McGuire at Berserkeley has to believe it. He’s an evolutionist moyboy. What other option is there? Well, read on. See what drove him and his colleagues to the crazy notion that dumb iguanas rode on rafts for 5,000 miles in the unobserved past: 34 million Darwin Years ago.

Iguanas floated one-fifth of the way around the world to colonize Fiji (UC Berkeley, 17 March 2025). As if in time for St Patrick’s Day, the press release features a green iguana on a tree in Fiji. How did it get there? The usual Darwinian way: stuff happens.

A Fijian crested iguana (Brachylophus vitiensis) resting on a coconut palm on the island of Fiji in the South Pacific. The four species of iguanas that inhabit Fiji and Tonga today are descended from ancestors that colonized the island within the past 34 million years, probably by rafting 5,000 miles across the Pacific Ocean from western North America.

To believe this, one has to think of a desert iguana in California happening upon a log at the beach, enduring months at sea with nothing to eat or drink till it happened to disembark on Fiji. Is that credible? Well, the evolutionists say, they “know” a shorter voyage was attempted.

Iguanas have often been spotted rafting around the Caribbean on vegetation and, ages ago, evidently caught a 600-mile ride from Central America to colonize the Galapagos Islands. But for long distance travel, the Fiji iguanas can’t be touched.

Fiji or bust! Drat. Forgot the wife and kids! Now we can’t evolve. (Grok/XI)

But 5,000 miles is over 8 times as far as Fiji. Did they observe iguanas colonizing the Galapagos? No; they assume that’s how they got there from the mainland. Unlike Galapagos finches, iguanas can’t fly. The marine iguanas can swim, but desert iguanas assumed to be ancestors of the Fijian species do not swim, and do not live near beaches. Why do they think they could be ancestors, then? Evolution. Once again, imagination is the key to accepting crazy ideas. Simon Scarpetta shuts his eyes of scientific observation and switches to imagination mode.

“You could imagine some kind of cyclone knocking over trees where there were a bunch of iguanas and maybe their eggs, and then they caught the ocean currents and rafted over,” Scarpetta said.

If this were a common occurrence, surely sailors would have caught some desert iguanas riding the Fiji Express log system by now. What about those Caribbean rafting iguanas? There was one sighting of iguanas on a vegetation raft landing on a Caribbean island in 1995 that observers assume came from 200 miles away. They would have spent 3 weeks at sea, Wikipedia says. But those green iguanas are swimmers; the alleged ancestors of Fiji’s iguanas lived in deserts. Island stopovers between California and Fiji are few and far between. That this happened is crazy, indeed:

“That they reached Fiji directly from North America seems crazy,” said co-author Jimmy McGuire, UC Berkeley professor of integrative biology and herpetology curator at the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology. “But alternative models involving colonization from adjacent land areas don’t really work for the time frame, since we know that they arrived in Fiji within the last 34 million years or so. This suggests that as soon as land appeared where Fiji now resides, these iguanas may have colonized it. Regardless of the actual timing of dispersal, the event itself was spectacular.”

And there’s the key to the imaginary voyage: Deep Time and evolution.

Scarpetta collected genome-wide sequence DNA from more than 4,000 genes and from tissues of more than 200 iguanian specimens housed in museum collections around the world. As he began comparing these data, one result stood out clearly: The Fiji iguanas are most closely related to the iguanas in the genus Dipsosaurus. The most widespread of these is the North American desert iguana, Dipsosaurus dorsalis, which is adapted to the searing heat of the deserts of the American Southwest and northern Mexico.

These moyboys credit “Charles Darwin, the originator of the theory of evolution by natural selection” for the gift of imagination. We count at least nine news websites that report this rafting-to-Fiji story uncritically. Live Science, naturally, loves every new plot that Darwin Party imagineers come up with: “Iguanas sailed one-fifth of the way around the world on rafts 34 million years ago.” Predictably the Darwin-promoting rag Nature pushed the scenario, too: “Iguanas colonized Fiji after surviving an 8,000-kilometre sea voyage — the longest known oceanic migration by any land-dwelling vertebrate.”

Isn’t evolution wonderful? Give it plenty of time, and stuff happens. It must be true. PNAS published it with peer review. Peer review guarantees the truth of this “extraordinary oceanic dispersal event” that must have happened because a species of swimming iguana was once observed going 1/25 that distance between islands in the same chain. That and comparative genomics led them to this as the best of “hypothesized biogeographic scenarios.” The main reason, though, is the requirement to believe in evolution and deep time. “Oceanic islands have played a pivotal role in the development of biogeographic and evolutionary theory,” the authors say.

The Darwin in the tale; The Darwin in the tale; Hi, Ho, scenario, The Darwin in the tale.

Intelligently Designed Rafting

European hunter-gatherers boated to North Africa during Stone Age, ancient DNA suggests (Live Science, 16 March 2025). People, we all know, have a wanderlust and the mental capability for purposeful intentionality to get where they want to go. Just a few thousand years ago (more or less), early people groups made it by watercraft across the Mediterranean Sea. It wasn’t an accident. It didn’t result in the origin of species. And it didn’t take millions of years.

If scientists were not so determined to preserve King Charley from shame at all costs, they might be open to more common-sense views: namely, that iguanas were created. After the Biblical flood, animals and plants rapidly dispersed around the world. During the Ice Age, sea levels were much lower (evidence by seamounts with flat tops), resulting in land bridges connecting the continents and many islands until sea levels rose to their current levels.

No evolution required; no millions of years. No crazy imaginary stories, because the outline of history has been given to us by the Eyewitness. Deny that, and you have dumb iguanas boating a fifth of the way around the world, and monkeys crossing the Atlantic screeching, “Land ho!” Since improbable rafting is central to Darwinism (7 May 2021), crazy scenarios sail free in the ocean of the imagination.