Fast Tetrapod Evolution Looks like Slow Tetrapod Creationism

 
I saw a report on yet another study which challenges a naturalistic view of origins, though the government-funded researchers cited in the article didn't put it that way of course. 

Advocates of naturalism: I am going to start this post off with points you may have heard before but if you keep reading you will see I am going to take it somewhere you very, very likely have not considered before, because it is based on results discovered only in the last two or three years. I am asking that you not leap to conclusions based on the first paragraphs and dismiss it as something you've already considered. Try to hear what I am really getting at. It is amazing and frustrating at how hard it has been to get people, regardless of their philosophy, to do this. Everyone scans until they can put what they read into some box they have pat answers for. If you do this here, you are not getting it. Despite my writing this warning, I predict that most naturalists who read this post will still do it. That's how powerful and debilitating mental Pidgeon-holing is.

Consider these quotes:

"The researchers also found that most of the close relatives to tetrapods had exceptionally slow rates of anatomical evolution, suggesting the fish relatives to tetrapods were quite well adapted to their aquatic lifestyle.

"On the other hand, we discovered the evolutionary lineages leading to the first tetrapods broke away from that stable pattern, acquiring several of the major new adaptive traits at incredibly fast rates that were sustained for approximately 30 million years," said Simões."

So far interesting, but only a little out of line with the Punctuated Equilibrium view of evolution which popped up some decades back. That is, there are large periods of stasis which are broken by periods of very rapid change. Most don't dare call these events "macro-evolution" but that's what they are talking about. Notice two things. One is that the rate of change wasn't just fast but "incredibly fast". The fast changes continued for thirty million years, but that doesn't mean that the change from fish to tetrapod took that long. It is just how long the rapid changes went on for. With just a little more looking they may find what they found with the incredibly fast changes in the Cambrian Explosion.

That is, that while the period of rapid change in the Cambrian went on for 30 million years, the initial burst occurred in less than 410,000 years. This is obviously too fast for new basic body plans (phyla) to evolve by any mechanisms that we see operating today. Even if by some rare yet natural chance a hopeful monster could be born with a successful new body plan, it doesn't explain why over a dozen new body plans did so at the same time. How come all the miracles happened in such close succession? 

Under naturalist premises the original idea was that evolution was constantly occurring as creatures were shaped by their environment. Once they learned more they realized that while this does go on, it is limited in extent and forms are stable most of the time. There is a slow background sort of evolution as the earth fiddles within a type. It is only on rare occasions that this stability is punctured (thus the name Punctuated Equilibrium) by rapid change. In an impressive feat of cognitive dissonance, some naturalists will hold this view while at the same time denying there is any difference between micro-evolution and macro-evolution, claiming one is just the cumulative effect of the other. 

Under the original idea a new niche opening up is what precipitated the evolution of new forms. This idea has been kept, without noticing how it is incongruous with newer discoveries in the field and Punctuated Equilibrium. Essentially, once in a great while by chance there will be an exceptionally unlikely event. Nature pops up with something very different from what was before it only a short while back. If there is an unexploited niche for it to fill then it prospers greatly. All by chance, no intent or Designer required. It seems like a reasonable idea on the surface. Yet people haven't stopped to realize that the party line on unexploited niches doesn't fit with the party line on P.E. and what we have actually found in the Cambrian. 

Hear this: even if they were right about this process, under P.E. an empty niche does not guarantee that a creature will show up to fill that empty niche. It still requires the exceptionally unlikely event. Under the old view, where change was steady state and continuous, and forms near infinitely malleable without islands of stability, it made sense that empty niches would be inevitably filled. Under P.E. it doesn't make sense and it surely doesn't make sense that the new forms would all arise in a batch as they did during the Cambrian. They'd have us believe that all of the exceptionally unlikely events occurred together, yet it was still chance and not intent which brought them about!

To many creationists, in particular Old Earth ones, P.E. is simply accommodating evolutionary theory to describe what things would look like if supernatural creation were also true. That is, the steady state sort of background evolution is the earth bringing forth living creatures and the establishment of new kinds is God helping nature fulfill His command to nature. My particular view of Genesis chapter one is a Christ-centered one: We live in a universe fit for beings like us- we can't do God's will without God's help and neither can nature. This is why, not only is there a difference in micro-evolution and macro-evolution, but macro-evolution actually happens much faster than all but the smallest variations via micro-evolution. When God gets involved, big changes can happen fast. When nature is left on her own, it takes a long time to make very little progress. It isn't that evolution is untrue, it is just a part of what is being done in creation. 

And then, the pattern seems to be repeating itself with the tetrapods. But something else happened with tetrapods, and it is a repeat of the pattern seen of ocean life in the Ordovician. See these quotes from the article:

The researchers also found that the fast rates of anatomical evolution in the tetrapod lineage were not associated with fast rates of species diversification. In fact, there were very few species around, so few they had a very low probability of being preserved in the fossil record.

This finding helps to answer an ongoing debate in evolution of whether new major animal groups originated under fast rates of anatomical change and species diversification (the classical hypothesis). Or, if there were high rates of anatomical evolution first, with increased rates of species diversification occurring only several million years later (a new hypothesis).

"What we've been finding in the last couple of years is that you have lots of anatomical changes during the construction of new animal body plans at short periods of geological time, generating high rates of anatomical evolution, like we're seeing with the first tetrapods. But in terms of number of species, they remained constrained and at really low numbers for a really long time, and only after tens of millions of years do they actually diversify and become higher in number of species. There's definitely a decoupling there," said Simões.

It sounds like they are saying that macro-evolution happens fast, but micro-evolution happens slowly in nature. That isn't what they expected under naturalist premises, that's why the idea is  "a new hypothesis". Note I did not put the parenthesis in the quote above, they were from the article.

Now here is the new observation I want to make: if this happened under naturalistic processes there would be no reason for diversification of a new type of creature into a new environment full of new niches to be delayed. It is like the new form of tetrapod was immediately well-adapted to be a generalist in its new niches. Under P.E. it is unlikely enough that nature even produces a new form, but when it does so, it is supposed to be a stroke of luck, not bit-by-bit shaping. So there is no reason for such a new form to be well-adapted to its new environment. Therefore there is no reason why speciation should be delayed. Indeed, there should be more impetus for it than there was in the original stable environment from which it came. Instead we see big changes continuing for millions of years and only many millions of years later species diversification occurring. 

This is nonsensical under naturalistic premises. One extremely rare event (high rate of anatomical 'evolution') is followed by others, but the normal sort of background evolution doesn't even start filling in with a diversity of species until much later. 

Someone suggested to me that the new tetrapods had a new environment so they didn't need to speciate to fill niches within that new environment. This doesn't take into account how things really work. If the first tetrapods fill a niche at the mouth of a river, after the first thousand years those down river are not competing with the population still at the mouth, but the original niche at the mouth of that river is very much filled, and if they try to go down river the adjacent population is already there, so the same evolutionary pressure that supposedly always work to drive speciation should be at work after a matter of centuries if not sooner. The great delay in this sort of background evolution while macro-evolution continues to churn out one miracle after another of creatures perfectly suited for their increasingly inland freshwater environment flies in the face of what we would expect to happen if natural forces are totally responsible for the change. The new form was supremely suited for the role of generalist in the new environment so that there was no pressure for speciation for a very long time. This only makes sense under the old slow environment-shaping evolution or special creation. Sudden appearance of a new form is incongruent with sublime suitability in the new environment, unless there is more than blind chance at work.

If natural explanations were correct then we should see new species branching off each new form very quickly. We don't. It is as if each new form was already well-adapted to its environment. That isn't the footprint of blind nature at work friends. It looks exactly like what things should look like if there was a Designer who knew what He was doing. 


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My book about early Genesis is far more about Theology than science, and that's good. I've come to see we won't really get the science right, big picture anyway, without getting the theology right. 

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