Less than a year before his tragic death, paleontologist Günter Bechly posted a long and powerful article here, “Three Modern Scientific Challenges to the Causal Adequacy of Darwinian Explanations.” The challenge that especially caught my eye at the time was the “species pair” problem.
As is well known (at least to SCT readers), new organs and entire new body plans seem to consistently appear suddenly in the fossil record. Harvard paleontologist George Gaylord Simpson summarized the fossil record on this point. From “The History of Life,” in Volume I of Evolution after Darwin, University of Chicago Press, 1960:
It is a feature of the known fossil record that most taxa appear abruptly…. Gaps among known species are sporadic and often small. Gaps among known orders, classes and phyla are systematic and almost always large. These peculiarities of the record pose one of the most important theoretical problems in the whole history of life: Is the sudden appearance of higher categories a phenomenon of evolution or of the record only, due to sampling bias and other inadequacies?
Of course, evolution must be gradual if Darwinism or any other materialist explanation is possible, so Simpson, like Darwin and almost every other evolutionist since, goes on to argue that the “sudden appearance of higher categories” is an illusion, that these major changes were not really sudden, only rapid. After all, the Cambrian and other “explosions” could have taken as long as 5-10 million years.
Orders, Classes, and Phyla
I have often pointed out that gradual development of the new features or organs that gave rise to new orders, classes, and phyla would require the development of new but not yet useful features, so Darwinism could not explain the development of these new features even if they did occur gradually. In the video “Why Evolution Is Different,” beginning at 14:40, I show how similar the evolution of life is to the “evolution” of software or automobiles or other human technologies, with similarities between new creations and previous designs but with large jumps where major new features appear, for the same reasons. (At the beginning of another video, “A Mathematician’s View of Evolution,” the connection between the evolution of life and of software is further discussed.)
Living Species Pairs
Bechly refutes the idea that unguided evolution could explain new body plans even if the Cambrian and other explosions lasted several million years. He does so by looking at living species pairs:
The morphological similarity of modern species pairs that have diverged in a similar time frame poses a severe problem, because it implies that the macroevolutionary processes that were at work and common in the history of life in all periods of Earth’s history and all groups of organisms, apparently were totally absent in the origins of all of the millions of living species. To make this point I surveyed TimeTree.org (Hedges and Kumar 2009, Hedges et al. 2006, 2015, Kumar et al. 2017), which is a databank of 148,876 living species of all kinds of organisms with molecular clock estimates of their time of divergence based on 4,185 studies. When probing any pair of species, even those with longer divergence times than available for the development of the body plan differences between, for example, pakicetids and basilosaurids (separated by about 4-5 million years), we find without exception that their morphologies are hardly distinguishable for laymen and they often still can hybridize.
After citing several examples, such as Asian elephants (like the one at the top of this page) and their African counterparts, which apparently diverged about 8 million years ago, Bechly summarizes:
Most of these recent species pairs only differ in allometric measures and minor color pattern. They usually look so similar that they could hardly be distinguished by laymen, even though they were separated for a much longer time than was available for most major transitions in the fossil record.
His point is that “There are clearly limits to what unguided evolution can do within a few million years, and these limits are far below the level of any major body plan transitions.”
“What About Great Apes and Humans?”
The living species pair argument is powerful and interesting, but what is especially of interest to me is that there seems to be one exception:
So, what about great apes and humans? Chimp (Pan paniscus) and gorilla (Gorilla gorilla) diverged according to TimeTree 8.6 million years ago and humans (Homo sapiens) from chimps 6.4 million years ago, which agrees with the hominin fossil record. There are two possibilities: Either you follow those scientists who consider the biological difference between humans and chimps as marginal. Then this example would just confirm the pattern described above. Or, you consider humans as very different from chimps, based on their different bipedal locomotion and especially their mental capacity and cultural achievements. In the latter case humans would represent the only exception to the pattern that I could find, which arguably would represent a remarkable confirmation of Judeo-Christian human exceptionalism.
Despite false and misleading claims about a 98 percent similarity between human and chimp DNA, anyone with common sense can see that the differences between humans and chimps are not “marginal” but that this is in fact a spectacular exception to the pattern.
A Lot of Intelligent Design
Furthermore, looking only at the skulls of modern humans and earlier primates and pointing out the similarities is as misleading as looking at only the frames of “evolving” computers. My 1980s PC and my 2025 PC may look very similar on the outside, but the evolution of modern computers from older models still required a lot of intelligent design. Most of the major advances in computer technology would not be apparent to future paleontologists if they could only dig up the outer frames after the inner hardware and software had disappeared.
In his 1956 book, A Biologist’s View, French biologist Jean Rostand observes:
It does not seem strictly impossible that mutations should have introduced into the animal kingdom the differences which exist between one species and the next…hence it is very tempting to lay also at their door the differences between classes, families and orders, and, in short, the whole of evolution. But it is obvious that such an extrapolation involves the gratuitous attribution to the mutations of the past of a magnitude and power of innovation much greater than is shown by those of today.
Bechly ends his section on the species pair problem with a similar conclusion but then offers another, even more interesting, observation.
In my view the cumulative evidence suggests that the only adequate explanation is that Darwinism is wrong, and this applies not only to the neo-Darwinian process of random mutation and natural selection but to any unguided evolutionary processes…. There is no evolutionary reason why the creative power of this process should have been active over all of Earth’s history but then ceased to function within the past 10 million years.
Intelligent design proponents can easily explain this pattern: there was creative intelligent intervention in the history of life, but this creative activity deliberately ceased with the arrival of humans as the final telos. Any further identification of the intelligent cause would have to transgress the methodological limits of the design inference, but Judeo-Christian theists will certainly recognize an eerie correspondence with the Biblical message, which says that God rested from his creative activity after the creation of humans (Genesis 2:2-3).