Gumby Clocks Keep Darwin Time

Rapid evolution does not solve
the problem of complexity.
It intensifies it.

 

When the Beginning of Complex Life Becomes a “Timing Adjustment”

By John Wise, PhD

A journal paper in Systematic Biology promoted by  The Conversation, claims to solve Darwin’s long-standing problem with the fossil record. The abrupt appearance of animal life, we are told, is not really a mystery after all. Evolution simply ran faster at the beginning.

The popular article does not hide the stakes. Its title alone promises a breakthrough: “A speeding clock could solve Darwin’s mystery of gaps in animal fossil records,” January 6, 2026. The author, Max Telford, frames the problem with candor:

The oldest fossilised remains of complex animals appear suddenly in the fossil record, and as if from nowhere…. The rapid arrival of animals so different to each other (and their absence in even slightly older rocks) was a headache for Charles Darwin because it seemed to go against his idea of gradual evolution.

Then he quotes Darwin himself, acknowledging the depth of the difficulty:

If my theory be true … during these vast … periods of time, the world swarmed with living creatures. To the question why we do not find records of these vast primordial periods, I can give no satisfactory answer.

So far, so good. This is the problem as it really stands, even today: the sudden appearance of complex animal life at the very beginning of the fossil record. The article reassures the reader:

…a recent paper may provide a solution.

But notice what quietly happens next.

From Origin to Maintenance

The fossil record shows that most major animal body plans appear suddenly in the Cambrian, with little sign of gradual assembly. This has troubled evolutionary theory since Darwin himself.

The journal report reframes this not as a problem of form, but of timing. Molecular clocks, the authors argue, have been too rigid. If early evolutionary rates were much higher, then large genetic divergences could have accumulated before fossils had much chance to form or be preserved.

Nothing unusual happened. The clock was just running fast.

But notice that the question has changed. It is no longer, how did complex animal body plans arise? It has become, instead, how can molecular dates be made to line up with fossils? This is not explanation. It is reconciliation.

A Flexible Clock Is No Longer a Clock

The paper does not present new fossils or new biological mechanisms. It introduces a more flexible statistical model, allowing evolutionary rates to accelerate when needed. When dates conflict, rate flexibility absorbs the tension.[1]

The cost, however, is steep. Once molecular clocks can speed up or slow down as required, they lose their independence as evidence. They are no longer testing evolutionary history. They are being tuned to preserve it. A clock tuned to agree with the story doesn’t confirm the story.

It serves it.

Why Speed Makes the Problem Worse

Long ages were supposed to make complex life plausible. Given enough time, the improbable becomes possible. This is the essence of Darwinian gradualism. But this paper’s solution compresses the decisive events into a shorter window. The origin of animal body plans now happens rapidly, early, and without clear precursors. Speed does not solve the problem of complexity.

It intensifies it.

If everything that follows the Cambrian explosion is variation on themes established within it, the real question is not when complexity diversified, but how it appeared in the first place. Reducing that moment to a timing adjustment does not explain it. It evacuates explanation altogether.

A Two-Phase History Quietly Admitted

The technical paper, “Evolutionary Tempo, Supertaxa, and Living Fossils,” Systematic Biology, November 2025, goes further than the popular article suggests. It explicitly predicts a pattern that mirrors the Cambrian explosion itself:

This model predicts that diversity is dominated by a small number of extremely large clades at any historical epoch including the present; that these large clades are expected to be characterised by explosive early radiations accompanied by elevated rates of molecular evolution; and that extant organisms are likely to have evolved from species with unusually fast evolutionary rates.

Translated plainly, this is an admission of a two-phase history of life. First comes a brief, explosive phase in which major animal body plans appear rapidly and dominate all subsequent diversity. Only later does evolutionary history slow into a long process of variation, specialization, and refinement within those established designs.[2]

This describes the Cambrian pattern remarkably well. What it does not do is explain it.

Why This Does Not Shake the Earth

This problem should be destabilizing to the theory, as Darwin acknowledged. The abrupt appearance of complex animal body plans at the beginning of the fossil record strikes at the heart of evolutionary explanation. Yet in today’s evolutionary biology, it produces no crisis.

The reason is not that the problem has been solved, but that it has been “reclassified.”

Modern evolutionary biology no longer operates as a unified framework that must explain the origin of complexity as such. It functions instead as a confederation of specialized subfields. When a problem becomes too resistant, it is externalized. We’ve seen it before. If origin of life is too difficult to explain, simply externalize it as outside the scope of evolutionary theory.

Here the Cambrian explosion is no longer treated as the origin of animal form. It is treated as a disagreement between clocks. This kind of work helps preserve internal consistency, but it does not answer Darwin’s question.

Accounting does not shake the earth.

When the solution to the problem of complex life is reduced to a timing adjustment, explanation has already been surrendered, and “to the question why we do not find records of these vast primordial periods,” evolution still “can give no satisfactory answer.”

[1] We should not forget the supercilious response of the secularists to Creationist claims that the rate of past radioactive decay might be different from that measured today.

[2] It also sounds suspiciously like pre- and post-flood eras. Shhhh … they might withdraw their paper!

---

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.