In a nice and long bonus video for the latest Science Uprising video, evolutionary biologist Richard Sternberg answers questions about support for Darwinism from the fossil record. The fossils do NOT support Darwinian theory in anything like the way you’d think from perusing, say, that copy of National Geographic on sale at the supermarket.
As Sternberg points out, the image of slow, stately evolutionary change from the National Geographic mythos is contradicted by something else you’ll see at the market: the humble shrimp. They simply burst on the scene and have stuck around:
The edible shrimp you might find in the grocery store that’s farmed, they appeared in the Permo-Triassic or the Jurassic and their body plan has remained essentially the same ever since. They have a lot of genetic diversity, yet in terms of their morphological features they appear in the fossil record and they’ve been with us for well over a hundred million years.
Explosions of new life forms followed by stasis are emphatically not what evolution expects to find, but it is what paleontologists do find. And it’s perfectly compatible with intelligent design. If you missed the latest Science Uprising episode, “Fossils: Mysterious Origins,” see it now: