human judgment. And when humans have expectations about what mental picture the fossils are expected to show, they can manipulate fossils to fit those expectations. The same is true with molecular studies used to infer evolutionary relationships.
Clam fossils help scientists find errors in evolutionary tree calculations (University of Chicago). This press release from December 1, 2021 bears thinking about. It’s a rare example of evolutionists admitting that almost every evolutionary study out there right now is underpinned by questionable assumptions. What do they really know about the emergence and extinction of lineages?
David Jablonski, Distinguished Service Professor of Geophysical Sciences at the University of Chicago and a senior author of a paper in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, noticed a “troubling” assumption underlying many efforts to construct phylogenetic trees.
University of Chicago scientists—along with colleagues at the Smithsonian Institution, the UK’s Natural History Museum and the Field Museum—found that one basic assumption made in most models can significantly distort the evolutionary picture, causing the scale of evolutionary recovery from a massive extinction to be off by as much as 400%.
The effect of assuming a “forking” event makes the emergence of new species appear earlier and faster. This leads to assumptions of rapid “evolutionary” change after a mass extinction, which may not be accurate. By comparing the “forking” and “budding” models,
They found a huge difference. “You might not expect a simple decision to have that big of an effect,” Jablonski said. “But it turns out if you force that assumption on your data, you really lose some of the big picture.”
A larger lesson from this article is the pervasiveness of assumptions in historical sciences like evolution. One cannot take a time machine to see what happened. Fossils are interpreted according to a prevailing worldview picture.
Studying bivalves (e.g., scallops, oysters), for which there is an extensive fossil record, Jablonski and Nick Crouch noticed how errors can creep in by assumption.
For example, the forking method suggests that seven major lineages emerged after the extinction at the end of the Mesozoic. But the fossil record says it was 28. “That’s a four-fold difference,” Jablonski said.
This is troubling, because mass extinctions are an important element in how biologists understand evolution, Crouch said: “Mass extinctions are incredibly influential in shaping biodiversity. You get lineages that are completely wiped out, and entirely new ones that emerge in response. They are a major factor in evolution.”
However, by using an evolutionary model that allows for budding instead of splitting, the scientists got a picture that much more closely matched the fossil record.
Note: Darwin skeptics should take note that these two are speaking from their evolutionary perspective. Creationists would explain many of the species as diversity within a created kind, not the origin of new species." CEH
