Darwinian Flexibility and Living Fossils

Charlie Darwin believed evolution by blind faith. His followers past and present accept it despite lack of strong evidence, hoping that their beliefs would be justified later. That is the opposite of science, old son. They have problems with living fossils that, in and of themselves, falsify evolution.

Living fossils are creatures that were thought to be extinct but later found doing well, or that have gone mostly unchanged over alleged millions of years, such as sea lilies and feather stars. Darwin knew about them. Now someone is stepping up to evosplain the problem away.

Sea lily (crinoid), Wikimedia Commons / Alexander Vasenin (CC BY-SA 3.0)

People who know evolutionary concepts can see through attempts at rescuing Papa Darwin. F'rinstance, evolution is presented as almost an irrevocable force in nature; things must evolve over millions of years. There are "evolutionary pressures" that force them to change — except when they do not change, and that is called stasis. Because reasons.

One idea that really takes the rag off the bush is how organisms really are evolving, but it's so slow, it's down at the molecular level. Evidence, please? The inconvenient truth for these owlhoots is that God created the world recently. Yes, variation and speciation exist, but there is no science for one thing turning into another. That answers the living fossils question.

Darwin knew about living fossils. In fact, he coined the term. In The Origin of Species, he used the phrase living fossil to describe extant species that have changed little from fossil ancestors.

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The fossil record should exemplify “the very process of natural selection, through which new varieties continually take the places of and exterminate their parent-forms,” he said, while discussing the pervasive lack of intermediates found as fossils (ch 9, p 280). He attributed the gaps to inadequate sampling of the fossil record—a claim that may have been plausible in 1859, but is difficult to argue today now that fossils from all parts of the world are known. Most discoveries today fill in known types rather than uncover completely new forms.

Recently, a Darwinist from Flinders University took on the job of explaining living fossils in Darwinian terms.

To read all of this interesting article and be amazed at evolutionary hubris, see "How to Darwinize Living Fossils."