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To: trek
And, given the time frame involved with the Celocanth, it seems that the Theory of Evolution would have to explain why some species are not seen to evolve.

And it does, although it's incorrect to say that some species "don't" evolve. Even the ones that stay looking relatively the same over very long periods of time have still evolved in significant details.

For example, the coelacanth has not survived "unchanged". Modern coelacanths are significantly changed from the 340-million-year-old ancestral version, to the point where they are assigned not only to different species, but even to a different genus altogether.

They're still recognizably in the same family, though, which is considerably less evolutionary change than, say, a modern pelican compared to its ancestral therapsid dinosaur over the same timespan, but the point remains that the coelacanth is not actually "unchanged", and its evolution did not somehow "stop" during the last 300+ million years.

And varying amounts of evolutionary change in different lineages is no challenge to "darwinism", as some like to claim, since Darwin himself predicted this effect in his "Origin of Species" book back in 1859.

131 posted on 12/30/2005 7:57:03 PM PST by Ichneumon
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placemarker


134 posted on 12/30/2005 8:29:27 PM PST by js1138 (Great is the power of steady misrepresentation.)
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