A Tale of Two Worms: (R)Evolution on Trial in the Age of Genomics
Through two studies about
worms, we see a conceptual
crisis in evolutionary biology
Two transparent worms shed light on evolution: Study finds pace of evolution in organisms varies by cell types. (University of Washington School of Medicine, 19 June 2025).
Let us come and observe what kind of light is being shed on evolution.
by John Wise, PhD
A Dickensian Dilemma
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness…”
These famous opening lines from Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities capture a tension in evolutionary science today. In two recent studies on annelid (worm) genomes, we find a paradox that challenges the coherence of the evolutionary narrative. One study presents a tale of radical, genome-shattering transformation – Worm One (which we first discussed here); the other a tale of astonishing genomic conservation – Worm Two. Together, they reveal a radical flexibility—less in the genome, more in the story evolution tells. Through these two studies, we see a conceptual crisis in evolutionary biology.
Burgeoning new technologies for sequencing genomes are providing a flood of new data, methodologies and procedures for investigating and articulating puzzles on the evolutionary map.[1] It is the best of times for discovery – data is pouring in faster than we can process it.
Worm One (Short-term Chaos)
Our previous article on revolutionary chaos in annelid evolution represents one side of a tension that threatens to shatter the narrative into “thousands of pieces” without possibility of “reassembling itself.”
That study described how marine annelids supposedly shattered their genome into thousands of pieces (their language, not mine) and reassembled it in an evolutionary leap to colonize land 200 million years ago. It is a dramatic story, replete with “explosions of deep genetic remodeling” and a genomic “superpower” allowing survival of catastrophic meltdown and reorganization. Evolutionary gradualism here faces the guillotine.
The account stretches credulity, especially when we get a glimpse of how complex life is at the cellular level. “Evolutionary catastrophism”[2] as a solution to fossil saltations threatens a revolution that may devour its children and its progenitors. Rather than natural selection, it is a deus ex machina – an appeal to miraculous, unobservable, and unrepeatable events.

A type of roundworm.
Worm Two (Long-term Stasis)
Researchers studied gene expression in two species of roundworms that diverged 20 million years ago on the evolutionary timescale. To their amazement, the worms maintained nearly identical gene expression patterns and body plans – not revolution, but stasis. The genome has scarcely changed over 20 Ma.
How could evolution leave these worms unchanged for so long?
“It was just remarkable, with this evolutionary distance, that we should see such coherence in gene expression patterns,” said Dr. Robert Waterston, … co-senior author of the paper. “I was surprised how well everything lined up.”
All the cells in both worms have been identified and mapped. Despite 20 million years of evolution, the two worms retain nearly identical body plans and cell types, with an almost one-to-one correspondence that makes them ideal subjects for comparison.
Were there changes? Yes, but small-scale and lying outside some sort of fundamental change-defying boundaries (hmmm … I wonder how they got there?).
… finding that some gene expression was conserved wasn’t surprising, because of how similar the worms’ bodies are. But it was surprising that when there were changes, those changes appeared to have no effect on the body plan.
“It’s hard to say whether any of the differences we observed were due to evolutionary adaptation or simply the result of genetic drift, where changes happen randomly,” he said. “But this approach will allow us to explore many unanswered questions about evolution.”
Here, evolution is quiet, slow, almost non-existent. Changes occur only in specialized cells, like neurons, and even those have no apparent impact on the overall form. The worms, to borrow Dickens again, are “recalled to life” today in the same body they had 20 Ma ago. As noted in our last paper, whether evolution was catastrophically fast or agonizingly slow, worms remained worms across the phylogenetic spectrum.
The worms crawl in … and the worms crawl out.
The Age of Wisdom vs. The Age of Foolishness
So which is it? Is evolution a story of genome-shattering revolutions or conservative stasis? Are living genomes stable and resistant to change, or infinitely malleable, able to initiate and survive catastrophic chaos and yet completely reassemble themselves … no intelligence required?
The evolutionary paradigm requires both these stories. When the data shows change, we are told it supports evolution. When the data shows stasis, we are told … it supports evolution. As in all Hegelian philosophy this theory cannot predict; it can only offer post-hoc justification. This is not science as discovery, but science as demystification. The goal?
Never allow a divine foot in the door; whatever that takes is justified.[3]
Two Worms, One Truth
These worm studies do not clarify evolution; they expose its turgidity. The “best of times” for data has become the “worst of times” for evolutionary theory. The worms tell two tales, and both lead us back – not to a history of evolutionary Process, but to Edenic perfection, where each was created after its kind.
In the end, perhaps the greatest saltation is not found in the genome, but in the mind willing to see the Designer in the data. The moment we set aside the myth of purposelessness and embrace the truth of design may be, as Dickens wrote, “a far, far better thing” than we have ever done.
Within a Young Earth Creation framework, these research findings are not contradictory. Marine and terrestrial annelid genomes don’t evidence catastrophic change but distinct created kinds; conserved expression patterns are not evidence of stasis over long ages, but of designed variation within a kind.
The Creator built systems that resist chaos yet adapt when needed. We don’t need to posit miracles to explain survival after genomic disintegration. Our Divine foot explains away the worries of your divine foot; it is not a hindrance to science, but the very foundation upon which science stands.
The deus ex machina appeal to 3D genomic architecture already acknowledges a higher-order principle – something materialism alone cannot account for. The divine foot is already in the room. It is not mere irony that today’s evolutionary science increasingly invokes design while denying the Designer.
“The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom.”
Why continue to constrain science with the shackles of ideological denial of what is most evident? Why persist in adopting a counter-intuitive mystification that produces patent absurdities, unsubstantiated just-so stories, unfulfilled promises and failed predictions in place of the Mystery-that-Makes-Sense of the data without all this baggage?
Science is not a candle in the darkness, as Carl Sagan would have us believe. Darkness has no existence except as absence of light. Science’s flickering candle only reflects The Light that is Science.
Footnotes
[1] The same is true for astrophysics with first the Hubble and now the James Webb Space telescope.
[2] While geologists remain stuck in a Uniformitarian strait-jacket, we might wonder if they are a bit jealous of evolutionary biology’s freedom in this regard, “Hey, why does Chuck get to play with catastrophism and I can’t?”
[3] What follows is largely a play on Richard Lewontin’s famous comments in the foreword to Carl Sagan’s book, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Darkness (1977):
We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the Door.
John Wise received his PhD in philosophy from the University of CA, Irvine in 2004. His dissertation was titled Sartre’s Phenomenological Ontology and the German Idealist Tradition. His area of specialization is 19th to early 20th century continental philosophy.
He tells the story of his 25-year odyssey from atheism to Christianity in the book, Through the Looking Glass: The Imploding of an Atheist Professor’s Worldview (available on Amazon). Since his return to Christ, his research interests include developing a Christian (YEC) philosophy of science and the integration of all human knowledge with God’s word.
He has taught philosophy for the University of CA, Irvine, East Stroudsburg University of PA, Grand Canyon University, American Intercontinental University, and Ashford University. He currently teaches online for the University of Arizona, Global Campus, and is a member of the Heterodox Academy. He and his wife Jenny are known online as The Christian Atheist with a podcast of that name, in addition to a YouTube channel: John and Jenny Wise.
Comments
A great example of how the theory doesn’t truly explain anything, because it is used to “explain” everything! A micro version of the big-picture way in which evolutionists explain everything from the Cambrian Explosion and later “rapid radiations” to all the cases of living things that look much like fossils tens or hundreds of millions of years old! This comparison of worm stories is a great highlight.