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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