Organisms Refusing to Evolve Over Millions of Years

Several more cases of “extreme stasis” have turned up, calling into question Darwin’s notion of constant, gradual change over millions of years.

Earlier human migration: Science Magazine reports evidence of mammoth bones in Siberia that indicate hunting and butchering by humans, 10,000 years earlier than evolutionists presumed people should have been up those cold climes. New Scientist‘s headline reads, “Humans adapted to Arctic life 10,000 years earlier than thought.” The bones are claimed to be 45,000 years old; that means that humans were essentially the same as us—intelligent, adaptable and capable—for at least 8 times all recorded human history (actually, much longer: they believe upright, thinking hominins existed for 1-2 million years). That phrase “earlier than thought” shows up a lot in evolutionary studies. It means that evolutionists are surprised at cases of early appearance and stasis. This pattern stretches into much longer time periods in the following examples.

Tree shrews refused to evolve for 34 million years, Science Magazine says. A new fossil doubles its period of stasis. It has a “living fossil” story to tell:

Tree shrews are often held up as being living fossils, presumably very similar to our own earliest primate ancestor. The dearth of actual fossils of these small tropical mammals, however, has meant that much of this conclusion has been speculative. Li and Ni describe a new fossil tree shrew that is exceedingly similar to the extant pen-tailed tree shrew (Ptilocercus lowii), yet twice as old as any previously described sister taxa. The fossil suggests that this tree shrew has gone nearly unchanged since the Oligocene (over 34 million years ago).

Squid stasis for a much longer period was reported in Live Science. Belemnites are members of the Cephalopod (head-foot) class that includes octopuses, squid and cuttlefish. Fossils found in Solnhofen, Germany (home of Archaeopteryx and other exceptionally-detailed fossils of the Jurassic Period) show that one species was already highly skilled. “Generally speaking, Acanthoteuthis‘ fins and bullet-shaped body, much like modern squids’, suggest that it would be a good swimmer,” the article says. The Jurassic is claimed to span from 200 to 145 million years ago. Noting that cephalopods date back even farther, “500 million years,” the article points out that squid like this possessed balance-sensing organs (statocysts), muscles, cartilage, a digestive system, and 10 arms. Cephalopods also have exquisite eyes as complex as those of mammals, yet are not related to any tetrapods in the evolutionary scheme. For a type of animal that is abundant today, this squid had an awful long time to evolve into something else, but it didn’t. Its statocysts, for instance, “resembled structures found in pelagic squid” that swim in the same oceans today.

Crustacean stasis: A division of crustaceans called branchiopods includes many living species, including water fleas and fairy shrimp. Current Biology published a find with a headline that tells all: “A 365-Million-Year-Old Freshwater Community Reveals Morphological and Ecological Stasis in Branchiopod Crustaceans.” This phylum dates to the Cambrian Explosion. Early fossils of branchiopods have been found in fossil beds as widely dispersed as Canada, Scotland and Sweden. This new find in Belgium tops them all, yet looks strangely familiar:

Here we report the discovery of an ephemeral pool branchiopod community from the 365-million-year-old Strud locality of Belgium. It is characterized by new anostracans and spinicaudatans, closely resembling extant species, and the earliest notostracan, Strudops goldenbergi. These branchiopods released resting eggs into the sediment in a manner similar to their modern representatives. We infer that this reproductive strategy was critical to overcoming environmental constraints such as seasonal desiccation imposed by living on land. The pioneer colonization of ephemeral freshwater pools by branchiopods in the Devonian was followed by remarkable ecological and morphological stasis that persists to the present day.

Not only do the bodies (morphology) look the same, the whole community (ecology) looks the same. How do evolutionists deal with the fact that this fossil bed looks like it was buried recently? These biologists got creative with their Darwinian imaginations. The creatures evolved, they say, but not in ways that are visible to the human eye—they used encryption!

The ecological and morphological stasis may be explained by the mixing of eggs from decades-distant populations, a singularity likely to prevent the fixation of new phenotypic variations. Nonetheless, the apparent morphological stasis does not mean that these clades did not evolve through time, but rather that the changes are cryptic, as revealed by changes in egg size. In addition, variations in physiology and egg hatching phenology have been reported for several species without significant morphological change and seem to be important for the long-term occupation of ephemeral pool biotopes. Fishes are generally absent in ephemeral pools, and increased fish predation in marine and fluvial environments during the Devonian may have triggered the modifications that allowed large branchiopods to colonize these continental environments devoid of predators. Paradoxically, the variable and harsh ephemeral pool appears to have been one of the most stable continental ecosystems over hundreds of millions of years.

This admission is amazing. They found an ephemeral pool that should have been subject to variation and harsh environmental change, yet their dating of the fossils forces them to say it must have been “one of the most stable continental ecosystems over hundreds of millions of years.” Were there not meteors, tsunamis, continents subducting, and other dramatic geological changes, including major extinctions, in 365 million years?

B as in billions: The winner for stasis is the bacterium. PhysOrg discusses “evidence of cavity-dwelling microbial life from 3 billion years ago,” from a time when there was not supposed to be oxygen or protection from UV radiation. Supposedly, South African greenstone beds allowed microbes to shield themselves by dwelling in cavities in the rock. Notice the word similar in what they say about these microbes:

The team conducted multiple tests on the mats and the microbes found hidden under them, including bulk carbon and SEM analysis and Raman micro-spectroscopy and report that the microbes were shaped like rods, growing in train like filaments, similar to many bacteria alive today. They note also that the microbes were quite uniform in shape and that they were able to control their diameter and length as modern microbes do. The fossils are also approximately 500 million years older than any other previous fossil found in a habitat, and thus represent some of the earliest forms of life ever found (the very earliest date back to approximately 3.43 billion years ago.)

With their short generation times, bacteria should evolve very rapidly. Wouldn’t anyone get bored living in a rod-shaped cell for billions of years?

Wag your head in astonishment at the credulity of the modern evolutionary biologist. When they jumped onto Darwin’s bandwagon in 1859, and got drunk with his Darwine snake oil, their inhibitions over just-so storytelling faded away. They let go of their scientific rigor and all joined in singing, “How dry I am.” What they didn’t know was that Charlie bamboozled them. He sold them the Stuff Happens Law and tricked them into thinking Darwine was a health tonic; “Everything evolves constantly,” he would say, “except when it doesn’t. When something stays the same for billions of years, that’s evolution, too!” He used his own lyrics. He was really singing, “How wry I am.”