Evolution as a Magic Wand

Natural selection is the most creative force in the universe, Darwinists believe. It does anything evolutionists want.

Scaled, armored or naked: How does the skin of fish evolve? (University of Geneva). These Europeans don’t ask whether fish skin evolved. They only ask how it evolved. Evolution is so creative, it deserves our thanks.

It is therefore thanks to the evolution of the protective structures of the skin that several families of fish have migrated to the seabed and opened up new ecological niches, colonising more and more different environments, whether in fresh or salt water. “This has contributed to the establishment of this enormous diversity, which makes ray-finned fish the largest group of vertebrates on the planet”, concludes Juan Montoya.

Giant fossil flightless bird had an enormous body but was still ‘bird-brained’ (Phys.org). A giant Australian bird stood 3 meters high (almost 10 feet) and had an enormous beak. Evolutionists claim the “extinct giant mihirungs or dromornithid birds” are related to chickens, which are short and stubby and capable of flight. The giant flightless birds “likely had well-developed stereoscopic vision, or depth perception, and fed on a diet of soft leaves and fruit.” They say that these birds “were a distinctive part of the Australian fauna for many millions of years, before going extinct around 50,000 years ago.” Calling the last species an “extreme evolutionary experiment,” Trevor Worthy of Flinders University attributes purposeful planning to evolution:

“It would appear these giant birds were probably what evolution produced when it gave chickens free reign in Australian environmental conditions and so they became very different to their relatives the megapodes—or chicken-like landfowls which still exist in the Australasian region,” Associate Professor Worthy says.

Crocodile (New Guinea). From Wiki Commons

Snappy evolution was behind the success of ancient crocodiles (Phys.org). In this article, Darwin magicians adjust the speed of evolution to fit Darwin’s tree. Crocodiles had “fast evolution” in the past but slow evolution in the present.

“Our study shows that these very different ways of living evolved incredibly fast, allowing extinct crocodiles to rapidly thrive and dominate novel ecological niches over many millions of years.”

Professor Michael Benton from Bristol added: “It’s not clear why modern crocodiles are so limited in their adaptations. If we only had the living species, we might argue they are limited in their modes of life by being cold-blooded or because of their anatomy.

“However, the fossil record shows their amazing capabilities, including large numbers of species in the oceans and on land. Perhaps they only did well when world climates were warmer than today.”

Could it be that global warming was good for evolution? Why not bring it on, if animals can evolve incredibly fast?

Study challenges accepted notion of mammal spine evolution (Harvard University). This press release uses the e-word 18 times, accounting for everything from the success of lizards to the supple running movements of a cat. It does, however, challenge a long-standing notion that the lateral motion of ancestral reptiles evolved into the motion of mammals, which include vertical motions of the spine. They claim each group decided how it wanted to evolve.

“The ancestral stock that mammals evolved from didn’t look or function like a living reptile,” said Stephanie Pierce, Thomas D. Cabot Associate Professor of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology and curator of vertebrate paleontology in the Museum of Comparative Zoology, the study’s senior author. “They started off with their own unique set of characteristics and functions and then evolved toward mammals.”

Rare fossilized algae, discovered unexpectedly, fill in evolutionary gaps (Geological Society of America). Eukaryotes needed more time to evolve. Thankfully, Katie Maloney trekked into the Yukon to find algae fossils that she says evolved earlier than thought.

Maloney’s findings were published yesterday in Geology. She and her collaborators found macroscopic fossils of multiple species of algae that thrived together on the seafloor about 950 million years ago, nestled between bacterial mounds in a shallow ocean. The discovery partly fills in the evolutionary gap between algae and more complex life, providing critical time constraints for eukaryotic evolution.

Why did evolutionists need these eukaryotes to show up earlier?

“Algae became really important early on because of their role in oxygenation and biogeochemical cycles,” Maloney said. “So why does it take them so long to show up reliably in the fossil record? It’s definitely making us think more about animal ecosystems and whether or not we’re seeing the whole picture, or if we’re missing quite a bit from a lack of preservation.”

New probe set unravels evolutionary history of second-most diverse group of land plants (Phys.org). Evolution, evolution, evolution. Whatever these plants needed, evolution provided.

Due to the sheer size of the group and their long evolutionary history—replete with slow and rapid bursts of diversification and extinction—resolving their relationships has been a challenging task for systematists dating back to Linnaeus.

What they found was “reticulate” evolution, more of a network than a tree. But whatever it was, it was evolutionary, and that was OK for the press release writer.

Evolutionists are fooling themselves and the public by believing in magical powers of their favorite tool, natural selection, which they wave as a magic wand to solve every problem in biology.