Chapter 118 19.7 Birds of a feather flock together

The supposed intermediate species are conspicuously absent from the fossil record.As smug as creationists are about this, we must also acknowledge this fact.This "fossil dating" is a flaw in Darwin's theory.He asserted that in the future, when professional evolutionists explored more areas of the earth, they would surely fill in this gap.It is a pity that these gaps remain the same. "Fossil dating," once the talk of paleontologists, is now accepted by all academic authorities on evolution."There isn't a single instance in the known fossil record of a major morphological transition through gradual evolution, and thus no strong evidence for the gradual model," says evolutionary paleontologist Stephen Stanley, who is also an author of the study. Paleontologist Steven Jay Gould said:

All paleontologists know that intermediate forms of species are scarcely found in the fossil record; the transitions between major groups are abrupt... The fossils of most species share two features that contradict the theory of evolution: Stand still.During the time that most species were active on the earth, they showed no directional changes.The way they first appeared in the fossil record looks almost exactly the same as the way they died in the fossil record... sudden appearance.In any one area, a species does not appear by steady changes from its ancestors; it appears all at once, and is "fully formed" upon its emergence.

According to historians of science, Darwin's most far-reaching statement was that the great differences displayed by different aspects of life were actually an illusion.The principle that the sages have always taught—dragons beget dragons, phoenixes beget phoenixes, mice beget holes—is not true.The Bible says that living things were "created after their own kind"; most biologists at the time, including the young Darwin, believed that species would maintain their genus in an ideal way.Species determine everything, and individuals belong to species.However, the enlightened Darwin announced: (1) individuals have significant differences; (2) all living individuals have dynamic plasticity and infinite extensibility; so (3) many individuals scattered in the population are the most Pivotal.And the barriers erected between species are illusory and vulnerable.Darwin converted the differences between species into differences between individuals, thereby eliminating the barriers between species.Thus, life is an evenly distributed existence.

However, the study of complex systems, especially those capable of adapting, learning and evolving, has gradually raised doubts that Darwin's most revolutionary hypothesis was actually wrong.Life is largely like, and only slightly malleable.Species either survive or die.They transform into something else only under the most unlikely and uncertain conditions.In general, complex things fall into different categories, and those categories persist.Category stagnation is the way to go: the typical lifespan of a species is between 1 million and 10 million years. Things that resemble living organisms—economies, minds, ecological communities, even nations—also naturally differentiate into persistent clusters.And human institutions - churches, ministries, corporations - will find it much easier to grow on their own than to evolve.Most organizations will die if they have to stray too far from their origins in order to adapt.

"Organic" entities are not infinitely malleable, since it is not easy to change complex systems through a series of functional intermediate states.The directions and ways in which a complex system (like a zebra or a corporation) can evolve are extremely limited because it is a hierarchy of many sub-individuals.And those sub-individuals are composed of some sub-individuals, and the evolutionary space is also limited. So it should come as no surprise if we find that evolution actually proceeds in quantum steps.The existing components of an organism can be combined into one form or another, but never all forms in between.The nature of the hierarchical structure of the whole prevents the whole from reaching all theoretically possible states.At the same time, the hierarchical structure of the whole also endows it with the ability to complete large-scale transitions.Thus, the history of living organisms shows a record of jumping from one point to another.This is known as jump theory in biology (the word comes from the Latin saltare, meaning "to jump"), and it is not well received among professional biologists.With the growing interest in the "promising" monster theory proposed by Gorzschmidt, the mild jump theory has been rejuvenated, but the jump theory that completely ignores the transition state has so far So far it's still heresy.However, the interdependence and co-adaptation of the components of complex things will inevitably lead to quantum evolution.However, artificial evolution has not been able to produce an "organism" with a sufficiently complex hierarchical structure so far, so we have no way of knowing how mutations will appear in the synthetic world.