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stasis

Stasis: Mating behavior unchanged from Cambrian era

Researcher: And it provides strong evidence to suggest that a Limulus, or horseshoe crab-like behavior, already existed in the Cambrian completely by convergence. So, it really helps us to get a sense of how these animals were actually living millions of years ago." Read More ›

Those awful comb jellies betray the Darwinians again: They were even more complex than feared, starting at maybe 635 million years ago

They’re said to have appeared between 634 and 604 million years ago (Peterson and Butterfield, 2005) and figure in the Cambrian Explosion. Darwinians have been trying to Cancel the Cambrian Explosion since practically forever but it keeps coming back into the fact base. Read More ›

Researchers: Sand dollars and sea biscuits emerged earlier than thought

They are using the “molecular clock” technique to determine that. One wonders if that technique is not too risky in the absence of a fossil record. But “earlier than thought” has been a good bet in principle. Not so good for the “long, slow process of evolution” stuff though. Read More ›

The oldest cephalopods — much older than thought — had 10 working arms, not 8

Wouldn’t that mean that the cephalopods had an even more complex nervous system in the past? For that matter, why do we hear about so much stasis and so little about evolution? The evolution must be happening very fast, punctuated by long periods of stasis. Read More ›

How Darwinians deal with the lack of evidence for gradualism

They pick an easy target like body size, for one thing. A supposedly slam dunk paper deals with body size in mammals. Trouble is, says Casey Luskin, it’s too easy a topic. Body size is — everyone agrees — easily malleable, compared to say, the development of vision. Read More ›

Claim: Modern crocodiles are evolving rapidly

Into what? Crocobirds? Smithsonian Magazine is anxious for us to know that they are NOT "living fossils." They have evolved a lot, we are told, though admittedly they are evolving around in a circle. It would be interesting to know why stasis became such a threatening concept in some quarters. Read More ›

Stanford: Plants evolved complexity in two rapid bursts — 250 million years apart

Researcher: "The most surprising thing is this kind of stasis, this plateau in complexity after the initial evolution of seeds and then the total change that happened when flowering plants started diversifying," said lead study author Andrew Leslie, an assistant professor of geological sciences at Stanford's School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences (Stanford Earth). "The reproductive structures look different in all these plants, but they all have about the same number of parts during that stasis." Read More ›

Reptile’s skull changed little in 22 million years

At ScienceDaily: ""Basically, in anything except living fossils, you don't go 22 million years without evolving," said [Louis] Jacobs, professor emeritus of Earth Sciences at SMU and president of ISEM at SMU." (Well, first, if that’s true, maybe they were the “living fossils” of their day. Maybe it is not even that unusual. Any chance there is a pattern here that devotion to Darwinism prevents people from seeing?) Read More ›

At Mind Matters News: Do brains really evolve? The horseshoe crab’s brain didn’t

At Science News: "The preserved central nervous system lends insight into the ancient crab’s behavior, the researchers say. Because the fossil brain is so similar to the brains of modern horseshoe crabs, Bicknell says, it’s safe to say the ancient animal’s walking, breathing and even feeding habits were probably similar to horseshoe crabs’ today, including eating with their legs. " Read More ›