Pattern of Life Defies Evolutionary Expectations

According to this report a study has concluded that life has a strange pattern. A new type of organism will appear and last a long time with very little diversity, and then when it reaches a version of its modern form, have a "flowering" where it bursts forth into a wide variety of forms. It seems this pattern makes a mess of molecular clocks.

To quote the article:

Budd and Mann show that the ancestral forms of modern groups are typically rather few in number, and once they give rise to the modern group, they can be expected to quickly go extinct. The modern group, conversely, tends to diversify very quickly and thus swamp out the ancestral forms. Thus, rather surprisingly, living organisms capture a great percentage of all the diversity there has ever been.
The only exceptions to these patterns are caused by the "mass extinctions," of which there have been at least five throughout history, which can massively delay the origin of the modern group, and thus extend the longevity and the diversity of the ancestral forms, called "stem groups." A good example of this is the enormous diversity of the dinosaurs, which properly considered are stem-group birds. The meteorite impact at the end of the Cretaceous some 66 million years ago killed off nearly all of them, apart from a tiny group that survived and flourished to give rise to the more than 10 000 species of living birds.

Noting how early bird-like forms appear in the fossil record, I had speculated in Early Genesis, the Revealed Cosmology that Dinosaurs were "meant" to be birds all along. At any rate, this is yet another example of a pattern of life which defies naturalistic expectations but fits well with the idea that creation was working toward an intended end-goal. With help.
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New Study Opens Door to Mankind Being Much Younger (No YEC, Not THAT Much Younger)

A recent study now proposes that Sub-Saharan Africans also had introgression from a non-Sapiens source. They don't have a species to match with the alleged introgression, but the contribution in some extant African groups would reach double-digits! I think these statistical models have gotten out of hand and are connecting dots that don't really connect, but let's say they are right. Wouldn't this open the door to the distinct possibility that much of what we now think of as human genetic diversity is in fact from limited introgression?

So instead of the genetic evidence suggesting that our kind has been around 200K years or more there could have been a distinct low-diversity Homo Sapiens core group around for a far shorter time period. Maybe so distinct that there was only a short time at the start where they even interbred with the hominin zoo even a little bit. So Sub-Saharan Africans would not be older than the rest of humanity. They would just look older because a more heterogeneous genome has a higher mutation rate (W. Amos) and some introgression has not been labeled as such- we think its diversity picked up over a long period of time when in fact it was introgression of other-hominin genes that were just a little more diverse than ours.

No matter how they got here, "True" Homo Sapiens could have been a distinct population only as recently as the proposed introgression- 55-60K ago. Since the term "human" has been expropriated by naturalists to mean any hominin, I propose the term "Adamics" for this group. They started in the mid-east and NE Africa, and that's why the most "diversity" and "introgression" shows up in populations farthest from that area- in three different directions. I note that either this idea, or the ideas of Dr. William Amos cited above could produce a false "appearance of age" in a Mankind that started as a group rather than as a single couple. Calculations of "Most Recent Common Ancestor" don't really apply to any type of living thing which started as a population for reasons described here. 

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This article is not directly related to the Christ-centered model for early Genesis as described in my book. Still, I ask you to get the book...

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Gently Correcting William Lane Craig on Representative Adam

The recent (Dec of 2019) Biologos podcast on Adam presented an overly-negative view of "Representative Adam". They had the esteemed William Lane Craig critique Representative Adam, and here I sort of critique his critique. How do you dispute with a genius? Very gently! 

Ichthyosaur, Ichthyosaur, I've Heard Such Talk as That Before

I want to make a note of this report on a study of Ichthyosaurs. The article leads with a quote that sounds familiar to me in reference to many other groups.

Dr Ben Moon, who led the research, published in the journal Communications Biology, said: "Ichthyosaurs are a fascinating group of animals to work on because they evolved so many adaptations for living in water very quickly: a fish-like body and tail fin, giving birth to live young rather than laying eggs, and lots of different feeding styles.
"Because of this we expected to see a rapid evolution early after ichthyosaurs first appeared, but we were staggered by just how big this early burst was and how relatively short it was."

It was the sort of statement I had heard many times before, both for smaller clades of creatures at various points in earth's history and for the origin and diversification of aquatic life. For example the Cambrian Explosion (which revisionists are continually striving to minimize and re-interpret to make it seem less dramatic) and the later Ordovician. There is a repeating pattern. Basically there is a low-grade "steady state" evolution which just seems to tinker with existing types within a limited range, and then something else. Something which produces vast amounts of change in lengths of time which, though they may be long compared to humanity, are extraordinarily short in terms of an evolutionary time scale.

Something weird is going on and being co-flated with something ordinary, all of it being lumped together under "evolution". Since those who ought to won't differentiate these results with separate process names, I will. As a peace-offering, I will even use their language to do so: I will call the ordinary change that continues "evolution", and I will call the astounding large-scale and rapid change which comes and goes away "macro-evolution".

The article notes that after their big burst of diversification Ichthyosaurs stayed diverse for quite a while, but ceased the rapid macro-evolution noted earlier. Then there was a mass extinction event which  only one line of the Ichthyosaurs survived. This surviving lineage went on for an extended period, but never diversified much. Sure there were a number of different species, but they stayed close in form to the one original surviving line. This despite being in all sorts of circumstances similar to the original diversification, such as times of mass extinctions. Why did this lineage quit macro-evolving?

This is something I have noted before. It is like "evolution", or at least "macro-evolution" plays with a group for a while, and then fixes its attention elsewhere. In the big picture I noticed that reptiles pretty much stopped macro-evolving while the line leading to mammals seems to have continued to do so. Why did one group (the one which includes us and the animals most connected to our lives) continue to develop while the other forms lock in place for vast eons of time? "Macro-evolution" is not behaving so much as a universal natural force, but as a Designer with intent. Once one part of the job is done, once the playing-around with certain concepts is fully explored, attention is directed elsewhere.

Perhaps the reader is a bit confused as to what I am getting at with all this, so I will spell it out. I don't think the "macro-evolution" part is just nature. I have described elsewhere the gray areas between creation and evolution. There are some things that can occur which fit the standard definition of evolution, but are nevertheless special creation. The two blend into one event once one sees past the naturalist paradigm.

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This article is not directly related to the Christ-centered model for early Genesis as described in my book. Still, I ask you to get the book...

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