Plants evolved complexity in two bursts – with a 250-million-year hiatus (Stanford University). In the early days of his speculations, Darwin imagined the gradual, steady accumulation of favorable mutations. He envisioned a world in continuous change. When his theory accelerated in acceptance, though, weird things started happening to his clocks.
A Stanford-led study reveals that rather than evolving gradually over hundreds of millions of years, land plants underwent major diversification in two dramatic bursts, 250 million years apart. The first occurred early in plant history, giving rise to the development of seeds, and the second took place during the diversification of flowering plants.
The article doesn’t mention fossils, which might provide some objective metric (if the Darwin timeline were to be assumed). The reason is that there are no good fossils. Seed plants appear suddenly, and flowering plants appear suddenly without ancestors (this has long been called “Darwin’s Abominable Mystery”). By fitting what few fossils exist to the timeline, relativity accommodates the bad situation with time dilation. Evolution is fast, except when it is slow.
Reproductive innovations and pulsed rise in plant complexity (Leslie, Simpson and Mander, Science [373:6561], 17 Sept 2021). The scientific paper undergirding the Stanford press release (above) also shows how relativity works. The scientific team evaluated 1,504
One unresolved debate concerns trackways made by a tetrapod that preceded the famous fishapod fossil, Tiktaalik. This anomaly threatened sales of discoverer Neil Shubin’s Darwin-worship book, Your Inner Fish (6 Jan 2010). Can rate heterogeneity solve that crisis?
The study also innovates by combining data from fossil footprints and body fossils to pinpoint the time of origin of the tetrapods. “Normally footprint data shows up after body fossils of their track makers. In this case, we have tetrapod footprints much older than the first body fossils by several million years, which is extremely unusual. By combining both footprint and body fossils, we could search for a more precise age for the rise of tetrapods,” said Pierce.
Sure enough, relativity solved it. On the one hand, “The researchers also found that most of the close relatives to tetrapods had exceptionally slow rates of anatomical evolution” — but then,
“On the other hand, we discovered the evolutionary lineages leading to the first tetrapods broke away from that stable pattern, acquiring several of the major new adaptive traits at incredibly fast rates that were sustained for approximately 30 million years,” said Simões.
So now you know. Evolution is not a steady, gradual process like Darwin first imagined. It goes “incredibly fast” sometimes, and “exceptionally slow” at other times. It’s all a matter of your frame of reference.
What an absolute disgrace that these
storytellers tarnish science like this. What a worse disgrace that
people let them get away with it." CEH
