Recently an article appeared in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences[1] which concluded that observed changes in biological populations are usually short-lived, and typically fail to spread through the entire species.  According to lead author and zoologist Josef Uyeda (Oregon State University), “Rapid evolution is clearly a reality over fairly short time periods, sometimes just a few generations. But those rapid changes do not always persist and may be confined to small populations. For reasons that are not completely clear, the data show the long-term dynamics of evolution to be quite slow.”  He and his team concluded that it takes approximately one million years for a biological change to take root in a population.

This is just one more piece of bad news for Darwinists.  The fossil record indicates the sudden emergence of new species, long periods of stasis in those species, and then (often) sudden extinction.  There is no record of gradual change in species over time.  And now we are being told that the small changes we observe in species today usually have no long-term effect on the evolution of a species.

If it takes one million years for even small evolutionary changes to take root in a species that would explain why we see so little change in the fossil record, but it also drains the gas out of the Darwinian engine of evolution.  It becomes inexplicable how radical biological evolution could occur within millions or tens of millions of years when the evolutionary process is so slow.  You can’t get from New York to California in two hours doing 50 mph, and you can’t get from apes to man in 6 million years when it takes 1 million years for even small changes to take root in a species.

HT: Uncommon Descent

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[1] Oregon State University (2011, August 23). “Not so fast: Lasting evolutionary change takes about one million years, researchers find.” ScienceDaily. Retrieved September 1, 2011, from http://www.sciencedaily.com­/releases/2011/08/110822154752.htm.