February 4, 2015 | David F. Coppedge

Two Billion Years and No Evolution

It would seem Darwinism has been falsified by evidence for organisms that never evolved for “two billion years” but some call this a vindication for Darwin.

2 Billion Years Unchanged, Bacteria Pose an Evolutionary Puzzle,” Tanya Lewis writes in Live Science. As if ready for a creationist assault, she sets the stage for her defense:

Wedged inside rocks in the deep sea off the coast of Western Australia lurks an organism that hasn’t evolved in more than 2 billion years, scientists say.

From this deep-sea location, a team of researchers collected fossilized sulfur bacteria that was 1.8 billion years old and compared it to bacteria that lived in the same region 2.3 billion years ago. Both sets of microbes were indistinguishable from modern sulfur bacteria found off the coast of Chile.

But do the findings contradict Darwin’s theory of evolution?

You know she’s not going to yield an inch of ground to the anti-Darwin forces.  Neither will the authors of UCLA’s press release, where famous microfossil finder Bill Schopf hangs out.  These guys really know how to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat!

  • Research actually provides further support for Darwin, UCLA professor says.
  • An international team of scientists has discovered the greatest absence of evolution ever reported — a type of deep-sea microorganism that appears not to have evolved over more than 2 billion years. But the researchers say that the organisms’ lack of evolution actually supports Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution.
  • “It seems astounding that [this] life has not evolved for more than 2 billion years — nearly half the history of the Earth,” the study’s leader, J. William Schopf, a paleobiologist at UCLA, said in a statement. “Given that evolution is a fact, this lack of evolution needs to be explained.” [Live Science]

We wait eagerly for Schopf to make the vanished lady reappear on stage.  How can anyone possibly perform magic this difficult?

Here’s the trick:

Charles Darwin’s writings on evolution focused much more on species that had changed over time than on those that hadn’t. So how do scientists explain a species living for so long without evolving?

The rule of biology is not to evolve unless the physical or biological environment changes, which is consistent with Darwin,” said Schopf, who also is director of UCLA’s Center for the Study of Evolution and the Origin of Life. The environment in which these microorganisms live has remained essentially unchanged for 3 billion years, he said.

“These microorganisms are well-adapted to their simple, very stable physical and biological environment,” he said. “If they were in an environment that did not change but they nevertheless evolved, that would have shown that our understanding of Darwinian evolution was seriously flawed.

Schopf said the findings therefore provide further scientific proof for Darwin’s work. “It fits perfectly with his ideas,” he said.

So if the organism evolves, Darwin is vindicated. If it doesn’t evolve, Darwin is vindicated. Darwin can’t lose.

The non-evolution proves Darwin’s “null hypothesis,” Schopf says. No environmental change, no evolution. Simple. No magic here.

The discovery was published in PNAS.

How can you deal with these people?  It’s like nailing jello to the wall trying to falsify their idol’s theory. Darwin, Darwin, Darwin: the impregnable prophet of the god of omnipotent randomness. They just love repeating his name: it’s the chant of chance, the mantra of materialism. Ommmmm: it lifts them into an altered plane of consciousness, away from rationality. Wake up you people!

Schopf has gathered so much evidence before this to falsify Darwinism, it’s not funny. Over and over he has found little bitty microbes in the Precambrian over billions of Darwin years (Darwin years: imaginary lengths of ungodly quantities of time nobody ever witnessed, but must have existed because Darwin-Baal needs the time). Then all of a sudden, boom! The Cambrian explosion. Falsification! No; it “fits perfectly well with Darwin’s ideas,” you see. Evolution sometimes is fast; evolution sometimes is slow. Sometimes, it doesn’t move at all! What further scientific proof do you need, you ignorant creationist, you? Ommmmm.

Think how stupid this excuse is. These bacteria must have replicated uncountable times in 2 billion Darwin years. Surely, if mutation and selection could turn a cow into a whale in 9 million years with very long gestational periods and small populations, there must have been incredibly numerous opportunities for these bacteria to mutate and find better ways to eat sulfur: cook up some sulfur pancakes, or sulfur souffle, maybe some sulfur chili. Some of the bacteria could have grown arms and legs and big brains, and become entrepreneurs, setting up sulfur restaurants and sulfur supermarkets. Others might have designed theme parks with sulfur cotton candy. If Darwin’s theory were true, they could have organized sulfur governments in just a tenth the time it took everything else to evolve.

Who can possibly believe that on a dynamic planet, undergoing plate tectonics, asteroid impacts, climate swings and volcanism, the environments stayed the same for modern sulfur bacteria and their counterparts two billion Darwin years ago?  Any way you slice it, their excuse violates their own assumptions. We are not dealing with rational people who can look at evidence and follow it where it leads. We are dealing with ideologues who can stare down falsification with chutzpah because they are committed to it, evidence be damned.

Exercise: In the paper, Schopf qualifies his notion of “Darwin’s null hypothesis” (i.e., “if there is no change in the physical-biological environment of a well-adapted ecosystem, its biotic components should similarly remain unchanged”) with the caveat, “additional evidence will be needed to establish this aspect of evolutionary theory”—as if nobody ever thought of that before. So let’s help him out.  Using evolutionary assumptions and their timeline, find (1) organisms that were in a stable environment that did evolve. (2) Organisms that were in a dynamic environment that did not evolve, such as “living fossils.”

 

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Comments

  • tjguy says:

    Here is one example of a living fossil: The crocodile.

    Here is what one website says about crocodiles: “These beasts have exhibited the same body form since dinosaurs walked the Earth, SURVIVING THE MASS EXTINCTIONS THAT WIPED OUT NEARLY ALL OF THEIR MAMMOTH BRETHREN.”

    Read more: http://www.mnn.com/earth-matters/animals/photos/15-animals-that-are-living-fossils/crocodiles#ixzz3QmteVHAj

  • John C says:

    …And they start wrong. They take what is before them and claim it is ‘ideally adapted,’ but do not explain how it adapted to that environment in the first place. Does anyone hear the herd of elephants in the room?

  • mody says:

    Dear David :
    Evillutionists gone insane ….. how an ultimate deceiver can utter that non-evillution proves evillution ? did they forget that random mutations are working as a property of the genome no matter how the environment change ?
    What they say here is a brand new kind of evillution where the environment have the power to change the genome to suit it ……..what kind of nonsense are we dealing with?
    DISGUSTING……….indeed.
    Mody

  • mody says:

    What about the 500 million years living fossil nautilius eye without any modification to any other eye type ?
    That statements in the paper really made me feel that to just read it i must delete any reasoning power .
    Mody

  • mody says:

    Since all fossils are bones , then the only proof of evillution is finding a one to one correspondance between fossil bones and the basic assumption of darwinism : that there are a flux of continuous change in every single fossil bone no matter how the environment change … That flux is a built in property of genomes according to darwinism , homology is not a proof .. The proof is finding in the same species a flux of continuous change in every single bone that renders the whole skeleton a mess , This we DO NOT see in reality , so any sane mind will deduce from non-evillution that evillution is non-sense , period .
    Mody

  • mody says:

    Now read this ….
    This could demolish the foundation of darwinism .
    http://phys.org/news/2015-02-mechanism-inheritance-advance-evolution-disease.html

  • mody says:

    According to the above link , once somatic cells can in principle affect the germ line cells then all of darwinism as a matter of fact is OBSOLETE .

  • John D says:

    What ever happened to neutral evolution? Aren’t they forgetting that this was their answer to Haldane’s dilemma? Sure we can only fix X number of genes in the population per generation or year, but what about the genes that AREN’T under selection or get a free ride with those that are. That was their claim. So now, somehow some ghostly force has prevented neutral evolution from changing anything for not just 500 million years in something like horseshoe crabs, but 4 times longer. At this point, what is the point of measuring anyway?

    For a doglike creature to evolve into a whale now takes 2-3 million years.
    For bacteria to evolve into identical looking bacteria? 1000 times longer.

  • John S says:

    Same as the ‘climate change’ crowd. Their hypothesis is unfalsifiable. More ice or less ice? yes, see we are right!

    If the Darwinists can absorb soft tissue (and bury it) without missing a beat there is no stopping them ever, there is no evidence that can keep those carriers from their appointed rounds. until that day…

  • fsm says:

    I guess what is being said ( in the Live Science article) Is that evolution of a species halts if you fit in your environment perfectly? So God has at least one perfect creation and is still working on perfecting the rest?

  • lux113 says:

    “The rule of biology is not to evolve unless the physical or biological environment changes”

    Actually, to Darwinians, the “rule” is that things mutate (going by their religion anyway). So please do tell, how do accidental mutations play by the rules?

    Here’s the Darwinians escape hatch they would probably use “Mutations have been occurring for 2 billion years, but since the bacteria are already perfectly evolved for their biological niche the changes never are retained.”

    That would be a ridiculous claim There is no instance where 2 billion years of evolution would look like no change at all – and as I just said, mutations “just happen”. They are not dependent on the environment.

  • rockyway says:

    “Given that evolution is a fact, this lack of evolution needs to be explained.”

    – That’s got to be one of the funniest sentences I’ve read in a long time.

    – Let’s see; evolution is a fact… but it hasn’t happened… I guess that would make it a kind of non-existent fact.

    – I guess the new definition of evolution will turn out to be; “stasis over time.”

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