Fossil Friday: Evolutionary Stasis in Beetles
This Fossil Friday features the living ground beetle genus Loricera, which has recently been recovered as fossil adults and larvae from mid-Cretaceous Burmese amber. The genus belongs to the ground beetle family Carabidae and features in adults as well as the larval stage specially modified antennae and mouth parts for predation on springtails (Collembola) in leaf litter. Spiny hairs at the base of the antennae and the maxillae serve as a kind of catching cage for their springtail prey. This complex adaptation has now turned out to be much more ancient than expected.
In two recent papers Li et al. (2024a, 2024b) described adult and larval Loricera beetles from the mid-Cretaceous Kachin amber (Burmite) of Myanmar, which has been radiometrically dated to an age of 99 million years. These fossil beetles are basically indistinguishable from the various living species of the genus Loricera and have identical anatomical features of adults and larvae. This means that this beetle with its unique adaptations existed in unchanged form since at least about 100 million years and survived the mass extinction at the end of the Cretaceous period.
The Crucial Point
A popular science article in Wired (Kahil 2024) freely admits that “the Loricera beetle’s survival story challenges conventional notions of evolution” and exhibits “a remarkable consistency in an ever-changing world.” This is indeed the crucial point, because such striking cases of stasis are commonly explained away by evolutionary biologists as due to stabilizing selection in a stable environment of their ecological niche. However, this explanation simply is not plausible over hundreds of millions of years with changing habitats, changing climate, changing biota, and even mass extinction events of apocalyptic dimensions. The press release (NIGPAS 2024) reporting the new discovery acknowledges that “the K/Pg mass extinction triggered one of the most profound biodiversity reorganizations in geological history,” but still “the study suggests that both springtails and their predators have exhibited significant evolutionary stasis, both in terms of individual species morphology and community structure.”
Compare this with the evolutionist’s claim that pig-like mammals similar to Indohyus and Pakicetus changed into fully marine dolphin-like whales such as Dorudon and Basilosaurus in just 4 to 8 million years. Natural selection is the great magician in evolutionary fantasy land, where it explains rapid change in explosive radiations as well as no change at all over eons in so-called “living fossils.” However, a theory that is always perfectly consistent with any possible outcome is not explaining anything, but rather is as dubious as Freudian psychoanalysis or astrology, with their vague predictions that always fit. And every fit is sold to the gullible public as a successful corroboration of the theory, which is why people still believe in astrology and — for what it’s worth — in unguided evolution through natural selection acting on random mutations. It is time to call neo-Darwinism out for what it indubitably is: a pseudoscience, which is nurtured, promoted, and fiercely defended by a gigantic industry in mainstream academia that depends on it!
References
Kahil N 2024. This black beetle is a survivor of the dinosaur extinction. Wired November 4, 2024. https://wired.me/science/this-black-beetle-is-a-survivor-of-the-dinosaur-extinction/
Li Y-D, Tihelka E, Engel MS, Huang & Cai C 2024a. Specialized springtail predation by Loricera beetles: An example of evolutionary stasis across the K-Pg extinction. The Innovation 5(3): 100601, 1–2. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.xinn.2024.100601
Li Y-D, Tihelka E, Engel MS, Xia F-Y, Huang D-Y, Zippel A, Tun KL, Haug GT, Müller P & Cai C-Y 2024b. Description of adult and larval Loricera from mid-Cretaceous Kachin amber (Coleoptera: Carabidae). Palaeoentomology 7(2), 265–276. DOI: https://doi.org/10.11646/palaeoentomology.7.2.10
NIGPAS 2024. Cretaceous Amber Reveals the Stability of Beetle-Specialized Predation. NIGPAS Newsroom September 25, http://english.nigpas.cas.cn/new/hs/rp/202409/t20240925_690552.html
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