Two-Timers in the Darwin Party

Evolutionary rates vary by seven orders
of magnitude. What kind of theory is that?

 

“Natural selection can act only by taking advantage of slight successive variations; she can never take a leap, but must advance by the shortest and slowest steps” —Charles Darwin, Origin of Species, ch. 6

Evolution is boringly slow except when it is hyper-fast. For a theory of constant change, Darwinians want to have it both ways. And yet they base “molecular clock” studies on the assumption that gradual evolutionary change is so regular it can be used to calculate when groups of organisms emerged. Why do people fall for this chicanery?

For example, look at the difference between these first two headlines published almost on the same day:

1. Snakes are built to evolve at incredible speeds, and scientists aren’t sure why (Live Science, 22 Feb 2024). Darwin Party reporter Sarah Osborne says, “Snakes have an evolutionary clock that ticks a lot faster than many other groups of animals, allowing them to diversify and evolve at super quick speeds, researchers have discovered.”

Snakes have a supercharged evolutionary clock that enables them to adapt at far faster rates than other reptiles, scientists have discovered. This ability has helped them become evolutionary “winners” and spread across the planet.

“Snakes are like the Big Bang ‘singularity’ in cosmology — a dramatic expansion of diversity in species and their ecologies, linked to some event that might have occurred early in the evolutionary history of snakes,” lead author Pascal Title, a evolutionary macroecologist at Stony Brook University in New York, said in a statement.

Did this “evolutionary” macroecologist actually discover this? Did Dr Title use an “evolutionary” stopwatch to measure an “evolutionary” history he didn’t observe and announce this group of animals “evolutionary” winners? Osborne admits in her headline that “scientists aren’t sure why” this group inherited a supercharged evolutionary clock if there is such a thing outside a thought bubble in the Darwinist’s imagination.

2. Butterfly and moth genomes mostly unchanged despite 250 million years of evolution (Wellcome Sanger Institute, 21 Feb 2024). This article makes butterflies look worse than the tortoise and the hare. How could they ever win against the snakes in the race for fitness? Yes, there is diversity, but also incredible stasis in the genes of lepidopterans.

The most extensive analysis of its kind reveals how butterfly and moth chromosomes have remained largely unchanged since their last common ancestor over 250 million years ago. This stability exists despite the incredible diversity seen today in wing patterns, sizes, and caterpillar forms across over 160,000 species globally.

For most butterfly species examined, “The team found not only were chromosomes incredibly stable, but the order of genes within them was too.” Wouldn’t scientists expect at least a few periods of “supercharged” evolution during those 250 million Darwin Years?

3. Extraordinary preservation of gene collinearity over three hundred million years revealed in homosporous lycophytes (PNAS, 18 Jan 2024). If you need another example of “extraordinary” stasis, look at this paper about lycophytes. The order of their genes have not changed for “over 300 million” Darwin years.

Despite 350 Mya of divergence and independent whole genome duplications, synteny is remarkably well preserved between these genomes. This, combined with significantly reduced nucleotide substitution rates, suggests a contrasting mode of genome evolution between heterosporous and homosporous lycophytes.

A Story: Why Evolutionary Clocks Vary by Extreme Amounts

4. Limited ecological opportunity influences the tempo of morphological evolution in birds (Current Biology, 12 Jan 2024). These six Darwin disciples try to explain the extreme differences in evolutionary rates. If an animal has the “opportunity” to evolve, it will; otherwise, it won’t. Here’s how they summarize their argument:

• The availability of open niches is thought to accelerate evolution
• Models of trait evolution often fail to find evidence in support of this idea
• A new approach uncovers abundant support for the influence of ecological opportunity

Are we supposed to infer that snakes had lots of opportunity to evolve, but butterflies did not? Butterflies can fly! Some can migrate long distances. Surely they would have found a Darwin store with faster clocks as they crossed a continent, wouldn’t they? What’s going on in evolutionary theory here?

Birds can fly, too. These Darwin disciples want to have it both ways: fast and slow. They like fast-tempo Darwin songs some times, and slow-tempo Darwin songs other days. When opportunity knocks, they think, Darwin’s Tinker Bell flies into action!

Trouble is, they know this notion is not supported by evidence. So they went looking for evidence.

According to classic models of lineage diversification and adaptive radiation, phenotypic evolution should accelerate in the context of ecological opportunity and slow down when niches become saturated. However, only weak support for these ideas has been found in nature, perhaps because most analyses make the biologically unrealistic assumption that clade members contribute equally to reducing ecological opportunity, even when they occur in different continents or specialize on different habitats and diets.

No Darwinian wants to let a good story go. They found a way to rescue it by tweaking the plot.

To view this problem through a different lens, we adapted a new phylogenetic modeling approach that accounts for the fact that competition for ecological opportunity only occurs between species that coexist and share similar habitats and diets. Applying this method to trait data for nearly all extant species of landbirds, we find a widespread signature of decelerating trait evolution in lineages adapted to similar habitats or diets. The strength of this pattern was consistent across latitudes when comparing tropical and temperate assemblages.

But this new law of nature they supposedly found doesn’t work in the area where it should the most: the tropics.

Our results provide little support for the idea that increased diversity and tighter packing of niches accentuates evolutionary slowdowns in the tropics and instead suggest that limited ecological opportunity can be an important factor determining the rate of morphological diversification at a global scale.

They want to have it both ways: fast and slow. Where is the rule? If opportunity knocks, animals are supposed to speed up their evolution. But tropical birds violate the rule. So is evolutionary theory falsified here? No. Tropical birds evolved, so exceptions are allowed. This makes evolution unfalsifiable even if a third of observations don’t fit. Solution: just adjust the perhapsimaybecouldness dial.

Evolutionary biologists have long sought a general signature of the effect of limited ecological opportunity on the dynamics of trait evolution in comparative data, but thus far this signature has been detected in a handful of cases rather than as a general phenomenon. By modeling how trait evolution responds to dynamics of ecological opportunity for species that co-occur and are ecologically similar at a large taxonomic scale, we find support for ecologically mediated slowdowns in about two-thirds of our analyses. These evolutionary responses to diminishing ecological opportunity appear to have consistent effects across latitude, suggesting that ecological constraints are no more prevalent in hyper-diverse tropical systems than in temperate systems. Our results instead suggest that the degree of ecological opportunity is a key factor regulating the dynamics of trait evolution at a global scale.

The power of suggestion hypnotizes critics of Darwinism. The quote above could be summarized, “Hey, we suggest that it ‘could‘ happen, so where is your faith?” to which Darwin dobermans on X might bark to the critic, “What are you, an ignorant, stupid, nincompoop who doesn’t understand evolution?” The Stuff Happens Law has a corollary: stuff happens at different rates in different places.

Living Fossils Defy Evolutionary Rates

5. ‘Living fossil’ tree frozen in time for 66 million years being planted in secret locations (Live Science, 28 Feb 2024). Darwinist reporter Richard Pallardy from the Lie Science Evolution Propaganda Office expects his readers to believe that Wollemi Pines found an evolutionary Brigadoon that keeps them in a lovely niche that is “frozen in time”, exempt from the inexorable force of evolution for tens of millions of years. These pines were thought to have gone extinct two million Darwin Years ago, only to be found alive and well in Australia in 1994. Now, he says, they are being transplanted around the world. That fact alone gives lie to the notion that evolution slows down when a niche is filled. They had 66 million years to go forth and evolve around the world, but today’s Wollemi pines look the same as the presumably oldest ones.

6. Living fossils: 12 creatures that look the same now as they did millions of years ago (Live Science, 29 Dec 2023). Last December, Carys Matthews listed 12 living fossils, defined as “a species that hasn’t evolved significantly for millions of years and closely resembles ancestors found in the fossil record.” These include the nautilus (500 million years), coelacanth (400 million years), horseshoe crabs and cockroaches (300 million years), and ginkgo trees that “have barely changed in 200 million years.”

That’s the narrative for Darwin two-timers: evolution is super-fast except when it is virtually at a standstill. Believe it or else get censored! You don’t want to be called a science denier, do you?

BTW, Happy Leap Year Day. If you learn to leap over facts, and practice making evolutionary leaps whenever required (saltation), you might qualify some day for the Darwin Party Propaganda Squad.