"Evolutionists present inconsistent modes of evolution (#C254)
- Dynamic: the species is actively evolving 1
- Static: the species is not evolving, or is in “stasis” 2 3
Evolutionists present #1 to the public. However, when the data does not cooperate, they respond with #2. Using these two conflicting explanations, they can explain almost any data, making evolution a messy theory, not a clean, consistent scientific one.
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Sources
Coyne, J. A. (2009). Why Evolution Is True. New York: Viking.
Cotner, S., & Moore, R. (2011). Arguing for Evolution: An Encyclopedia for Understanding Science. Santa Barbara, Calif.: Greenwood.
Notes
- Coyne, 2009, p. 90: “Evolutionary theory predicts, and data support, the notion that as species diverge from their common ancestors, their DNA sequences change in roughly a straight-line fashion with time. We can use this “molecular clock,” calibrated with fossil ancestors of living species, to estimate the divergence times of species that have poor fossil records.” ↩
- Cotner and Moore, 2011, p. 52: “Horseshoe crabs, which may have evolved in shallow seas with other arthropods such as trilobites, are often called ‘living fossils’ because they have not changed much in the past 230 million years. However, they changed a lot before that.” ↩
- Coyne, 2009, p. 4: “Although all species evolve, they don’t do so at the same rate. Some, like horseshoe crabs and ginkgo trees, have barely changed over millions of years. The theory of evolution does not predict that species will constantly be evolving, or how fast they’ll change when they do. That depends on the evolutionary pressures they experience. Groups like whales and humans have evolved rapidly, while others, like the coelacanth ‘living fossils,’ look almost identical to ancestors that lived hundreds of millions of years ago.” ↩