Canis lupus hominis

Source.

I’ve never heard of Dr. Carl Werner before.

But he makes a claim that I haven’t heard before:

In the clip, he claims that evolution says all organisms change over time, but he has found fossil evidence that certain marine organisms from the fossil record are the same or very similar to ones living today.

That disproves evolution!

Um. No.

The theory of evolution does not say that all organisms will change dramatically over the millions of years of their existence. All evolution posits is that change will happen over time.

That’s all.

It doesn’t say that because it is impossible for things like sharks and clams to have remained very similar over the millions of years.

For example, we have lots of sharks in the ocean right now– and some are pretty strange– but we don’t haven any sharks living in the ocean today (as far as we know) that look like this species that lived 225-280 million years ago.

Werner wants us all to believe that just because certain organisms haven’t changed much that this somehow destroys evolution.

It does not.

All that he has done is present a kind of childish strawman argument, which he easily tears down using evidence that everyone agrees is correct.

We would expect to find certain marine organisms in the same layers that include dinosaur fossils. That’s because many of these organisms evolved long before there were any dinosaurs.

That they haven’t changed much since then is not evidence that evolution doesn’t happen.

It’s that some forms work really well, and there are no selection pressures for dramatic change.

Now, Werner would have an argument if we found fossils of organisms that are in layers that have been dated to a very different time to which we would expect to find them.

J.B.S Haldane, one of the founders of the modern science of population genetics, was once asked what discovery would make him doubt the fact of evolution.

“Fossil rabbits in the Precambrian,” was his answer.

He made this statement after being challenged by Sir Karl Popper to show that the hypotheses behind the theory of evolution would be falsifiable.

Haldane said the existence of rabbits from that time period would falsify evolution. Precambrian life forms were very basic– and not very common. Any fossils of that would be found in rocks dating to that period in earth’s history would be among the first organisms in existence.

If we discovered rabbit fossils in those layers, that would be major affront to the theory of evolution, for it would show that really advanced and complex organisms were around really early in earth’s geologic history.

And no one has found a rabbit from those layers.

I don’t know what sort of science Dr. Werner claims to be using here, but using strawmen to the basics of evolution isn’t a very good way to test the theory’s hypotheses.

It’s actually what we call intellectual dishonesty, and all it does is make him look like a total fool.

Evolution does not say that all organisms change dramatically over time.

Evolution merely posits that change happens.