Extreme Outlier Events - the Pattern in the Fossil Record

This article on Science Daily proclaimed, "A new normal: Study explains universal pattern in fossil record." Their summary was:

Instead of the typical bell-shaped curve, the fossil record shows a fat-tailed distribution, with extreme, outlier events occurring with higher-than-expected probability. Using the same mathematical tools that describe stock market crashes, scientists explain the evolutionary dynamics that give rise to universal patterns in the fossil record.

They were reporting on this Andrew J. Rominger study with the ungainly title "Nonequilibrium evolution of volatility in origination and extinction explains fat-tailed fluctuations in Phanerozoic biodiversity."

The Phanerozoic is the era of animal life as we know it, which is to say the last 543 million years according to most scientists. It seems they have realized for a while that new types of animals do not appear (and disappear) at a steady rate. There are bursts of the creation of new forms, and of extinctions of old ones. The distribution of events is "fat-tailed" and not what one would expect by chance.

Imagine you flipped 100,000 coins every year for 543 million years. You would expect the number of heads (which we could equate to a new organism showing up in the fossil record) and tails (which we could equate to an organism vanishing from the fossil record at a given point in time) to be about the same. But that's not what they see. They see periods where heads vastly outnumber tails and vice-versa. Not just at key periods like surrounding mass extinctions, but for the whole era! Why doesn't nature produce new types at a steady rate, forming a nice bell-shaped curve?

The study is extraordinary for many reasons. One is that it uses the term "macroevolution". This is a term that many are loathe to use because they dogmatically insist that there is only one type of evolution- the processes we see going on today producing small changes are responsible for the big changes we see in the fossil record.  The second section, paragraph three says:

The different regions of adaptive space occupied by different clades can be conceptualized as islands with unique dynamic equilibria, albeit with macroevolutionary processes determining the “colonization” of adaptive peaks, as opposed to short time scale biogeographic processes.

Granted they may not be using the term exactly like I would, but they are coming very close to what many creationists and theistic evolutionists have been saying for a while: that there is a type of background evolution that the earth does by itself in shaping species and a larger-scale force for change which is something different than that.

I also found it interesting that they used taxonomic categories to define their clades, and the reason for this"

We define potentially equilibrial subsystems based on taxonomic hierarchies, as a full phylogenetic hypothesis for all marine invertebrates is lacking.

There results were also very interesting. It turns out that what is driving the "fat-tailed" non-Gaussian distribution of new types is not at the family level or below. Those are stable and well represented by bell-curves. Instead it is events above the Family level.....somewhat in the case of Orders but really the Class and Phylum level that are skewing the whole fossil record. From the "Results":

We first evaluate the local equilibria of clades from family level to phylum. We find that family-level fluctuation distributions are well approximated by Gaussians (Fig. 1 and fig. S3). Three exemplar family-level dynamics are highlighted in Fig. 1 to illustrate how different volatility equilibria express themselves as actual richness time series. This Gaussian approximation also largely holds for orders, but classes and phyla increasingly show deviations from Gaussian with greater kurtosis, corresponding to more frequent outliers at these taxonomic levels (fig. S3).

Now they attribute this to the idea that a new Order or Phylum has a lot of new possibilities in form and function and as it diversifies can impact many environmental niches while Families generally occupy a more narrow range of niches so that changes within them are more in equilibrium. OK, I can buy, that, but that only explains that the "fat-tailed" improbable events are happening when a new Class or Phylum (and sometimes Order) appears. It doesn't explain how they got there or why it occurs in bursts and not on a regular basis. In fact the start of the study dismisses most explanations for this. It is one thing to say that a new Class of organism showing up, which then rapidly differentiates into various Families, shakes things up. It is another to say how that new Class got there and how it diversified so quickly after a long period of stasis. Indeed the study implies that the new Class generated Orders and Families which shook things up for existing ones which were in equalibria.

Does it make sense to you under evolutionary assumptions? I mean that a new class can spin off numerous new families that can go in and out-compete existing families that have long been honed and adapted to fill a given eco-space? It doesn't to me. The only thing that makes sense, and what I have heard a lot, is that right after mass-extinctions there is a "reset" of sorts where all surviving Classes get a new chance to adapt into an empty niche. And while I have heard that a lot the researchers don't seem to buy that or any other explanation for the patterns in the data that they see. The introduction concludes with " Thus, we still lack a theory to describe the striking fat-tailed nature of fluctuations throughout the Phanerozoic." Not just after the few mass-extinction events, but the whole era.

This is not what one would expect to find under a naturalistic evolutionary scenario. Not in the sense that the exceptional events do not follow a bell-curve distribution pattern but follow patterns in systems with intelligent input such as stock-markets. Nor in the sense that if random unguided processes could produce a new Class or Phylum that it could quickly differentiate into new families adept enough at exploiting new niches that they could not only survive but shake up things in the organisms which had been adapting to those niches for some time. Intelligent Design has no problem explaining either of those observations. It is what we would expect to see!

I don't see much stomach or intellectual curiosity among naturalists to face up to and examine these red flags to their paradigm. But that's not going to stop such flags from popping up as they learn to more deeply examine what is after all, God's Creation.

You Tube Channel

Please "like" and "share".