Living Fossils

Any evolutionist will tell you that mutations are one of the most important driving forces behind evolution. Why? Mutations provide the raw materials for genetic variation. And second, all organisms undergo mutations.

Actually, there is no special mechanism that exists in any animal that prevents mutations, especially over long periods of time. That’s why evolution is inevitable over millions and hundreds of millions of years.

This is why evolutionists find living fossils so baffling.

What is a living fossil? Well, Merriam-Webster defines it as: an organism that has remained essentially unchanged from earlier geologic times and whose close relatives are usually extinct.

For example:

• Ginkgo trees are identical to their apparently 125-million-year-old fossil.
• Living coelacanths are identical to their 340-million-year-old fossil
• Horseshoe crabs are believed by evolutionists to be, once again, unchanged for 200 million years

There are literally thousands of different types of animals and plants and counting, which are alive today and, for the most part, unchanged from their fossil counterparts. What happens when “evolution” doesn’t occur over hundreds of millions of years?

Famous evolutionist Stephen Jay Gould recognized this “stasis” of the evolutionary process as a major problem, saying, “Many leading evolutionary theorists … have been persuaded by punctuated equilibrium that the maintenance of stability within species must be considered as a major evolutionary problem.¹”

Because what is evolution without things evolving?

However, living fossils are no mystery for Christians.  As it was written in Genesis, God created all kinds of creatures within 6 days, and made each creature to “multiply after its kind”, so no evolution is required.  This multiplication did not take place over millions or billions of years, but just thousands.

1. Gould, S.J. and Eldredge, N., 1993. Punctuated equilibrium comes of age, Nature, 366:223–224.