So Where's the Evolution?

When you go looking for evolution and find stasis, has Darwin been falsified?

Lizard tales: Jonathan Losos went looking for evolution of Caribbean anole lizards. Digging through 5,000 pieces of amber, he found this, according to PhysOrg:

Using micro-CT scanning to capture images of the skeletons of more than three dozen samples, Losos and colleagues found that different habitat specialists evolved to occupy the same niches they live in today, and have remained largely unchanged ever since.

His paper in PNAS is titled, “Amber fossils demonstrate deep-time stability of Caribbean lizard communities.”  How much deep time?  About 20 million years—over double the time evolutionists believe a wolf-sized land animal evolved into a whale.  “The primary axes of ecomorphological diversity in the Hispaniolan anole fauna appear to have changed little between the Miocene and the present, providing evidence for the stability of ecological communities over macroevolutionary timescales,” the abstract says.

The mouse-fly ancestor: Researchers at Max Planck went looking for differences in the eyes of mice and houseflies. The two animals (an insect and a mammal) could hardly be more different; insects have compound eyes, for one thing, and are on a vastly separated phylogenetic lineage from mammals in standard evolutionary theory. But the team found a “surprising similarity” in their visual processing. “At first glance, the eyes of mammals and those of insects do not seem to have much in common,” a Medical Xpress article states. “However, a comparison of the neural circuits for detecting motion shows surprising parallels between flies and mice.”

One of the evolutionists remarked, “Insects and mammals are separated by about 550 million years of development and yet there are surprising parallels in how their brains process visual motion information”. There are differences, obviously, but neural circuits and brain processing for vision are highly complex things to have evolved by chance processes. The researchers seem undecided whether to call this a case of convergent evolution or common ancestry going back more than half a billion years:

There could be two reasons for the parallels in the processing of movements that have now been shown. One is that the neural circuit already existed in the common ancestor of these very different species. Alternatively, the same circuits could have developed independently of one another in mammals and insects. Regardless of the origin of the parallels, their existence shows that it must be a very robust and proven processing pathway. “We assume that this circuit represents the best-possible computation of motion directions by neurons – requiring the minimum number of cells and entailing maximum energy efficiency,” says Alexander Borst, summarizing the results.

So in other words, they find two optimum solutions that strain credulity to be related by common ancestry, but are willing to consider either that it did somehow anyway, or that blind chance hit on the same solution twice. How could a Darwin skeptic ever overcome this unfalsifiable reasoning? In the new film Living Waters, Dr. Timothy Standish discusses the uncanny resemblance of magnetic navigation in a wide variety of unrelated animals. After pointing out the improbability that these animals hit on the same solution, he argues from our common experience that designers, knowing of a solution to a problem, can apply it in different contexts over, and over, and over again.

Iguana tryst: Iguanas on the Galapagos islands are classified as separate species, but that doesn’t stop them from having affairs. Nature wants to have its Darwinism both ways. “Swimming lizards on one of the Galapagos Islands are evolving into new species, but they also seem to be mating with lizards from neighbouring islands — possibly helping to incorporate adaptations from other populations into their gene pool.” But how can they be evolving when they are still mating successfully?  Their answer is that some offspring are hybrids. “This simultaneous hybridization and speciation could have contributed to the evolutionary success of the marine iguana” it says, but that makes no sense in Darwinian theory. Hybridization is a dead end, not an evolutionary success.

Did Darwin get the Jurassic right?  This headline on Science Daily sounds like a hit for Darwin: “Jurassic saw fastest mammal evolution.” Species were popping up like gangbusters, according to Oxford researchers: “By calculating evolutionary rates across the entire Mesozoic, they show that mammals underwent a rapid ‘burst’ of evolutionary change that reached its peak around the middle of the Jurassic (200-145 million years ago).” Why, they were evolving 13 times faster than average! But there are problems. There’s also a burst in the perhapsimaybecouldness index:

‘We don’t know what instigated this evolutionary burst. It could be due to environmental change, or perhaps mammals had acquired a ‘critical mass’ of ‘key innovations‘ — such as live birth, hot bloodedness, and fur — that enabled them to thrive in different habitats and diversify ecologically,’ said Dr Close. ‘Once high ecological diversity had evolved, the pace of innovation slowed.’

None of this speculation matters, because it amounts to Monday-night quarterbacking after a big loss. It hasn’t hit the Oxford evolutionists yet that the Jurassic Period, with all its millions of years, never existed. The discovery of soft tissue in dinosaurs (see 6/09/15 and 6/10/15) has collapsed the fossil record down to much shorter timeframe, dismantling the geologic column. It makes all the mammals essentially contemporaneous—too close together in time to have evolved by natural selection.

One doesn’t need to wallow in ignorance about the causes of ‘key innovations’ in animals. Knowledge can be logically deduced from the evidence. Dr. Richard Sternberg shows how in the new film Living Waters.  After having demonstrated the impossibility of evolution in humpback whales, even granting Darwinians the most generous possible amount of time, he states: “Darwin proposed a way to get design without a Designer, or said that the designer was natural selection. But if that can’t happen, if these systems appear too optimal to have been cobbled together by some haphazard mechanism, then the flip side of that is: things appear designed because they are designed.”

Get Living Waters and start challenging Darwinism—a useless, fruitless, illogical myth that, like a drunken party crasher, has overstayed its unwelcome.