The ID Report

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

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).

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of the forthcoming The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).