Newly discovered life forms raise old question?: 600 Antarctic deep-sea animals

Nearly six hundred new species of crustacean were discovered recently by a deep sea probe (ANDEEP), 80 percent of which are new to science:

Recent expeditions to Antarctica's Southern Ocean have uncovered nearly 600 never-before-described organisms inhabiting that blackened abyss, including the carnivorous moonsnail. "Astonishingly high and unexpected" is how Angelika Brandt from the Zoological Museum Hamburg in Germany, describes the vast biodiversity she and colleagues have discovered in the depths of the Southern Ocean. Not quite the words I'd use, but then again, you'd have to stop me from screaming first.

Jasmin Malik Chua's article, "Aliens of the Deep", points up the fact that many ocean creatures are still unknown, especially those of the deep sea.

The reader who kindly sent me the link comments that many of these crustaceans look a lot like crustaceans of many millions of years ago. If so, that wouldn't be any surprise because a recent find that included soft body parts showed that crustaceans have not changed much in 425 million years:

'What is particularly interesting is the remarkable evolutionary stasis this fossil demonstrates,' said Dr Siveter. 'There are many species alive today of the myodocopid group of ostracodes, to which this fossil belongs, and the detail of the fossil shows us that they haven't actually changed much in 425 million years.'

This is one of the problems of evolution, called stasis: Complex body plans arise early and persist for hundreds of millions of years, with little change.

As Australian biologist Stephen E. Jones writes,

The history of most fossil species includes two features particularly inconsistent with gradualism: 1. Stasis. Most species exhibit no directional change during their tenure on earth. They appear in the fossil record looking much the same as when they disappear; morphological change is usually limited and directionless. 2. Sudden appearance. In any local area, a species does not arise gradually by the steady transformation of its ancestors; it appears all at once and `fully formed.'" (Gould, 1977a, p.14). "For millions of years species remain unchanged in the fossil record," said Stephen Jay Gould, of Harvard, "and they then abruptly disappear, to be replaced by something that is substantially different but clearly related" (Lewin, 1980, p.883). "At the core of punctuated equilibria lies an empirical observation: once evolved, species tend to remain remarkably stable, recognizable entities for millions of years. The observation is by no means new, nearly every paleontologist who reviewed Darwin's Origin of Species pointed to his evasion of this salient feature of the fossil record. But stasis was conveniently dropped as a feature of life's history to he reckoned with in evolutionary biology. And stasis had continued to be ignored until Gould and I showed that such stability is a real aspect of life's history which must be confronted .... For that was Darwin's problem ... Stasis, to Darwin, was an ugly inconvenience." "The principal problem is morphological stasis. A theory is only as good as its predictions, and conventional neo-Darwinism, which claims to be a comprehensive explanation of evolutionary process, has failed to predict the widespread long-term morphological stasis now recognized as one of the most striking aspects of the fossil record." (Williamson, 1981, p.214).

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Intelligent design academic publications.

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Intelligent design controversy My U of Toronto talk on why there is an intelligent design controversy, or my talk on media coverage of the controversy at the University of Minnesota.

Intelligent design controversy timeline An ID Timeline: The ID folk seem always to win when they lose.

Intelligent design and culture My review of sci-fi great Rob Sawyer’s novel, The Calculating God , which addresses the concept of intelligent design.

March of the Penguins A critical look at why March of the Penguins was thought to be an ID film.

Origin of life Why origin of life is such a difficult problem.

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Polls relevant to the intelligent design controversy A summary of recent polls of US public opinion on the ID controversy

Stove, David O'Leary's intro to non-Darwinian agnostic philosopher David Stove’s critique of Darwinism.

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