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arroba
Wake up.
From ScienceDaily:
Scientists have found eight well-preserved fossilized peach endocarps, or pits, in southwest China dating back more than two and a half million years. Despite their age, the fossils appear nearly identical to modern peach pits.
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“We found these peach endocarp fossils just exposed in the strata,” Su said. “It’s really a fantastic finding.”
Su said the discovery provides important new evidence for the origins and evolution of the modern fruit. Peaches are widely thought to have originated in China, but the oldest evidence had been archeological records dating back roughly 8,000 years. No wild population has ever been found, and its long trade history makes tracing its beginnings difficult. More.
Of course, humans have done a lot of breeding of peaches in the comparatively very recent past. But most of its history, it has been the same old peach.
Stasis is interesting because Darwin believed (his theory depends on it) that
… natural selection is daily and hourly scrutinizing, throughout the world, every variation, even the slightest; rejecting that which is bad, preserving and adding up all that is good; silently and insensibly working, wherever and whenever opportunity offers, at the improvement of each organic being in relation to its organic and inorganic conditions of life.
But nature does not do that, not in particular anyway. Sometimes things change, and sometimes they don’t.
Darwinism depends on the pretense that natural selection is a force of some kind. If all it means is that more life forms come into existence than can survive and breed, absent any specific further predictions, it is a trivial commonplace.
Anyway, Mother Nature is a beech, not a peach.
See also: Stasis: Life goes on but evolution does not happen
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Here’s the abstract:
Peach (Prunus persica, Rosaceae) is an extremely popular tree fruit worldwide, with an annual production near 20 million tons. Peach is widely thought to have origins in China, but its evolutionary history is largely unknown. The oldest evidence for the peach has been Chinese archaeological records dating to 8000–7000?BP. Here, we report eight fossil peach endocarps from late Pliocene strata of Kunming City, Yunnan, southwestern China. The fossils are identical to modern peach endocarps, including size comparable to smaller modern varieties, a single seed, a deep dorsal groove, and presence of deep pits and furrows. These fossils show that China has been a critical region for peach evolution since long before human presence, much less agriculture. Peaches evolved their modern morphology under natural selection, presumably involving large, frugivorous mammals such as primates. Much later, peach size and variety increased through domestication and breeding. Open access – Tao Su, Peter Wilf, Yongjiang Huang, Shitao Zhang, Zhekun Zhou. Peaches Preceded Humans: Fossil Evidence from SW China. Scientific Reports, 2015; 5: 16794 DOI: 10.1038/srep16794