[Hunble]

Since all or almost all of the METAZOANS (animals) first came on the scene at the Cambrian some 543 million years ago, there has been on average, a new FAMILY appear every 435 years. (543 million/1.25 million)

Major flaw in the basic premise, is the usage of a linear instead of an exponential growth rate. New families will appear slowly at first and emerge faster over time.

2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, etc...

[xyggyx]

Major flaw in the basic premise, is the usage of a linear instead of an exponential growth rate. New families will appear slowly at first and emerge faster over time.

2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, etc...

I agree, and I'd like to expand a little bit. There will be exponential growth for a while, until biodiversity reaches an equilibrium, where they won't be any room for new creatures. There's no niches to be occupied, no room for improvement via evolution. Species are already so efficient that any changes are a detriment.

There probably haven't been any new families of animals evolving in thousands and thousands of years. You would think that humans terraforming (farming, building cities)the planet would create new niches for animals to evolve, but humans "evolve" too fast. In 435 years the environment has changed a lot. There is concrete everywhere and the natural flow of water and other resources has been continually altered for those 435 years. We change things so fast, new species don't have time to evolve. There are probably new families evolving deep in untouched forests, under the ocean, or in jungles, but it's impossible to tell because we haven't catalogued every living being on the planet yet. You won't see a new family of animal evolving in your backyard because you mow it every week.

FYI I'm not a democrat or environut, don't flame me for being one. I didn't say that humans taking over the earth is a bad thing, I'm just trying to point out the ID'ers that you can't use raw, basic 8th grade statistics to prove things about evolution, there are too many variables.

[Ahban]

Major flaw in the basic premise, is the usage of a linear instead of an exponential growth rate. New families will appear slowly at first and emerge faster over time. 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, etc

Hardly a flaw in my premise, rather a point in its favor. If the number of families does indeed grow exponentially over time, then new families should be popping up at a HIGHER rate now than they did when there were fewer families on earth. We don't see them.