Add the Rapid Divergence of Reptiles to the List: "Evolution" had "Help"

"Their rates of evolution and diversity started exploding, leading to a dizzying variety of abilities, body plans, and traits, and helping to firmly establish both their extinct lineages and those that still exist today as one of the most successful and diverse animal groups the world has ever seen."

From a report on a paper about the emergence of reptiles, link below. The original hypothesis was that reptiles diversified so quickly because of an extinction event which wiped out their rivals. Now it turns out, the explosion of diversification started BEFORE their competitors were wiped out. Scientists now say the driving force for this ultra-rapid evolution was "climate change". They are saying that a lot these days- because that's where the funding is. Funny how "climate change" caused the reptiles to evolve super-fast for a while (and after mammals rose they quit evolving) while it caused their competitors to go extinct instead. 

The truth of the earth's record is that this is the recurring pattern. There is a stable and low rate of change, often around a mean, and then one particular category of creatures will have an astouding "burst" of evolution over a short period of time (compared to the stasis). Then that's it. The next time, they will stay relatively unchanged while some other group undergoes massive change. 

The Cambrian Explosion is well known. What isn't known is that most of the big changes took place over a mere 410,000 years. By the time the trilobites appeared, a modern marine ecosystem was already in place. Chordates show complexity from the start. Even humble comb jellyfish show comlexity from the start. Far, far beyond what known natural evolutionary mechanisms can produce.

 What also isn't well-known is that the mysterious Ediacaran biota didn't evolve much. they stayed much as they were the whole time until they all died out. No known survivors. If evolution is such a powerful and ubiquitous force, why didn't it change them? They were wiped out despite their 90 million year head-start on the Cambrian life forms.

The Great Ordovician Diversification event is another puzzle. After the Cambrian explosion, evolution returned to its background level of small, slow changes around a mean. Then suddenly a vast array of ocean orders started diversifying radically at once.  Then they returned to stasis. How did they all know to do that in a synchronized fashion? 

Something similar even happened within the Ichthyosaurs. A vast burst of diversity comes on suddenly when the type shows up, then a long period of stasis. The next crisis that comes along, it doesn't change again to adapt to it, it goes away. 

The same thing happened with the emergence of land animals. They underwent radical and sudden change, while what is supposed to be their immediate ancestors stayed the same. As the report puts it...

"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.

I suggest reading the whole link for more details, but the essence is that the opening of a new niche does not itself have the power to change life forms to fit that niche. Under naturalism, you must have that rare event by chance happen at just the time it is useful. None of this fits with the pattern of all of those useful rare events happening in clusters, sometimes in very different kinds of organisms. 

Nor does this, while all this great change is taking place, the formation of new species is rare. New families or sub-orders show up as a single species for a long time, and only after a while begin to diversity. There is a disconnect between macro and micro "evolution". You would think the latter happens faster, if naturalism is the explanation. But this isn't what we see. When big changes happen, they happen faster than the small changes. As they put it. ...

"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.

When nature was done with the dinosaurs, the non-avian ones went away. They were on their way out before the asteroid. They quit adapting. The rest of the reptiles quit evolving in big ways, but mammals started doing so. How is it that one group can evolve when the others don't, if for example "climate change" is responsible? How is it that a group that had a lot of "punctuated equilibrium" at its beginning loses all of its mojo and that propensity for "rapid change" goes to another group? 

The pattern of change fits the ID hypothesis more than the "blind nature at work" hypothesis. 

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