“Evolution in Real Time” (Yeah, Right)
The difficulty about denying evolution is that it’s happening all around us. I mean, just look — every few weeks or so another breathless press release or news article announces that scientists have observed “evolution in real time.”
Although these reports do not often mention that there is a debate over evolution, they serve an important rhetorical purpose in that debate. After all, the biggest challenge to Darwin’s theory is that it might not work in theory — the math does not seem to add up. One way to deal with the theoretical problems is to simply sidestep them altogether: “Maybe it doesn’t seem that evolution should work — but look, it’s happening right before your eyes!”
And it’s true — countless experiments do show evolution in real time. The trouble is, “evolution” itself isn’t really the thing in question in the evolution debate. Everyone who knows anything about biology (and most who don’t) believes in evolution in some sense of the word. After all, Darwin was not the first to notice that variations exist within populations, or that children can be different from their parents, or that some of these variations confer survival benefits while others are detrimental. The big question is whether these factors alone can drive the construction of novel complex systems of interrelated parts, such as characterize biological life.
With that in mind, let’s take a look at a few of the most recent “evolution in real time” proclamations, and see whether any of them actually bears relevance to the evolution debate.
1. Evolving to Be Normal (in the Mountains)
A recent case of “evolution in action” comes from a Study of human (for now!) women in Tibet. A news article dramatically proclaims: “Humans Are Evolving Right Before Our Eyes on the Tibetan Plateau.”
So, what are the new features of these evolving humans? (Are they on their way to becoming an alien species?)
Well, according to the study, Tibetan women are able to deal with high altitudes better than women of other ethnic backgrounds, on average, because they have … unusually normal hemoglobin levels. Excessive hemoglobin makes the blood more viscous, impeding circulation, and no women in the study had excessively high hemoglobin. In other words, there was loss of variety in the population, as traits that caused problems were eliminated by the harsh environment. The study also found that Tibetan women with traits favoring circulation (a wide left ventricle in the heart, etc.) were able to have more live births than Tibetan women with poorer circulation.
Basically, the study shows that harsh environments can weed out the unfit — which isn’t exactly a controversial idea. The study does indeed prove “evolution,” in the broad sense of the word. But it does not prove anything that is currently being debated.
2. Staying the Same — In the Blink of an Eye!
According to a news report from October 2024, the recently published results of a 30-year-long study demonstrate “evolution happening in real time” in snail populations. The researchers introduced crab snails to an environment inhabited by wave snails, and watched as the poorly adapted crab snails evolved over generations to look more like the well-adapted wave snails. The article informs us:
Normally, scientists have believed that it takes countless centuries for evolution to produce major changes in any species. However, a new study has witnessed this amazing process unfold in a figurate blink of an eye.
The rhetoric here should be obvious: If evolution can happen in just 30 years, why should we doubt that it can happen over millions of years?
And what kind of amazing new features is evolution able to conjure up in the “blink of an eye”?
Well, features that were already there:
What makes this study particularly fascinating is that the snails didn’t evolve these new traits from scratch. Instead, they tapped into genetic diversity that was already present in their population, albeit at low levels.
and possibly traits that slipped in through some hanky-panky with the locals
…This existing genetic variation, combined with possible gene flow from neighboring wave snail populations, allowed for rapid adaptation to the new environment.
3. The Importance of Already Existing
A similar example of “evolution in real time” comes from 2020 press release from the University of Vienna, announcing that Parachlamydia bacteria can adapt to their host to become more infectious.
So how do they adapt? Well, according to the Study, the population adapted largely by means of some genes that were already there getting passed on more than some other genes that were also already there: “standing genetic variation in the initial ancestral population — the founder Chlamydia and amoeba populations from which both regimes were initiated — appeared to be particularly important for the observed evolutionary changes.”
I would submit that that is to be expected.
4. “Evolving” into a Baby
Of course, I am not denying that novel mutations happens. Sometimes, by random error, a truly novel genetic sequence appears, and sometimes the change is adaptive. However, complex systems don’t get built this way.
So, a 2016 Article in Science boasted:
Many people think evolution requires thousands or millions of years, but biologists know it can happen fast. Now, thanks to the genomic revolution, researchers can actually track the population-level genetic shifts that mark evolution in action — and they’re doing this in humans.
But you can probably guess the type of changes that are measured. Lactose tolerance, blue eyes, blond hair, etc. These are minor variations within complex systems, not the construction of complex systems.
An especially ironic example is lactose tolerance. Babies consume lots of lactose in breastmilk, but human bodies are programmed to turn off that function after we stop nursing — or, that was the case until some humans started the practice of eternally nursing their bovine neighbors. Then (the classic story goes) “lactase persistence” was selected for, and the lactose processing facilities were never shut down. Michael Behe has compared this adaptation to “a small screw falling out of your car that renders the emergency brake inoperable.” The appearance of lactose tolerance doesn’t show evolution in action making any complex, new thing — it shows us becoming perpetual babies when we learned that some big, dumb animals would let us nurse them.
Whenever you hear about evolution in action, you can be sure that it wasn’t caught in action building a novel structure — at best, it was seen causing a neutral tweak to an existing structure, and at worst it was caught jettisoning sophisticated equipment for short term benefits.
5. Proving “Evolution” to the Yokels
A 2019 Article in The Atlantic tells the story of evolutionary biologist Rowan Barrett’s adventures capturing “evolution in real time” (as the title of the article puts it) in rural Nebraska. It’s a nice fish-out-of-water story:
Roughly a third of Nebraskans believe that living things were created as they are now. Another third think that evolution occurs, but through God’s design. Given those beliefs, I asked Barrett whether he ever encountered resistance when talking to his new friends about his work. “In the early trips, when first meeting people, I would talk generally about genetics and natural selection. I wouldn’t use the E word,” he said. “It’s one of those trigger words where, in certain parts of the U.S., people just stop listening to you.”
But he added that all of them comprehended the essence of evolution, even if they explicitly rejected it. “A lot of them are farmers, who have a very good understanding of inheritance, and genetics,” he said. “A lot of them hunt, so they’ve got the survival-of-the-fittest thing down. They understand variation, and they know that a slow deer is easier to shoot than a fast deer. Inheritance, variation, fitness … all the pieces are there.”
“I’d never push too hard. I never explicitly said, ‘Do you believe in it or not? Have I now convinced you?’” he told me. “I just had some long conversations over beers at BBQs and high-school football games. And I found that in subsequent trips, I could use the E word and not get the flinch.”
Yes, all the pieces are there…but what do they add up to? Barrett’s study is about changes in things like mouse fur color, which should be no cause for alarm even for the most science-hating creationist in Nebraska. A mutation that changes the color of a mouse’s fur is one thing, but building a mouse by compiling such mutations is another.
Yes, all the pieces are there…but what do they add up to? Barrett’s study is about changes in things like mouse fur color, which should be no cause for alarm even for the most science-hating creationist in Nebraska. A mutation that changes the color of a mouse’s fur is one thing, but building a mouse by compiling such mutations is another.
6. The Same, but Bigger
Granted, some evolutionary changes are more dramatic — but only superficially so.
For example, an April 2024 article reports that Dr. Tyrone Lavery at University of Melbourne has observed “evolutionary phenomenon happening rapidly” — lineages of large bats evolving from smaller bats multiple times across the Solomon Islands.
However, as Lavery himself notes, “Although they are very different sizes, the bats’ DNA is very similar.”
Some traits are dramatic, but don’t indicate an increase in complexity or a fundamentally new structure. And again (once again) fundamentally new complex structures are the main thing in question.
7. How to Put Things in a Pile — Without God
Another report, from the University of Konstanz in 2021, claims that researchers found the genetic imprint of “the surprisingly rapid transition from unicellular to multicellular life.” The rapidity is less surprising, however, after the authors clarify that what was observed was actually evidence of the “first step” towards multicellularity. That first step? Growing in a clump. It turns out there is a mutation in single-celled algae that causes them to clump together.
This is like putting a thousand identical screws in a pile, and saying you’ve accomplished the first step to making a car. That may be true, but the later steps — melting the bolts downs and forging them into more specialized pieces and then assembling them properly — are probably going to be more difficult.
8. Even Darwin Underestimated the Power of Evolution!
A Guardian article from this past July is titled “Biologist Rosemary Grant: ‘Evolution happens much quicker than Darwin thought’.”
Of course, the implication is that, contrary to the claim that Darwin overestimated the power of evolution, he actually underestimated it. But what evidence is Dr. Grant referring to? Well, the average beak and body size of a finch changed as the result of drought, quicker than Darwin estimated. Again, this is proof that evolution is real — but not that it has creative powers.
9. A Whole New… “Species
A related claim made about the finches in the drought is that that they evolved into a new species. This is true, but it may convey the wrong idea. When we talk about the origin of “species” it sounds like we’re referring to the creation of entirely different kinds of creature, with novel body plans, organs, and so forth. However, the most common definition of species, the “biological species concept,” is technical and much broader. Under this definition, any two populations of organisms are considered separate species if they are reproductively isolated; i.e., can’t or won’t reproduce with each other.
In the case of the finches, the drought caused their average beak size to increase from generation to generation, since birds that could crush harder seeds were more likely to survive the drought — and this changed their mating call, eventually making it unrecognizable to non-drought-influenced finches. Thus they won’t mate with each other, and therefore, based on the biological species concept, they are different species.
According to this definition of species, Democrats and Republicans are pretty close to achieving speciation. But that’s hardly an impressive evolutionary feat.
10. “Evolution” by U-Haul
Yet another article announces that a sociological study has found that public attention towards the lionfish (pictured at the top) “is aiding in monitoring its evolution nearly in real time.”
To be exact, it is the range of the lionfish that is evolving — they are migrating to different waters.
(And that probably takes the cake for least impressive example of “evolution in real time.”)
11.Wait, There’s More!
They just keep coming.
Mere hours ago (as of this writing) Georgia Tech put out a research press release announcing “some of the clearest evidence to date of evolution in action.”
The study does indeed show evolution in action. The researchers were observing a species of anole lizards in the wild over the course of several years, when, fortuitously (for the researchers, not the anoles), another species of anole invaded. That meant that the scientists were able to see whether the presence of new competition changed the native species.
And sure enough, it did. The original anoles were driven from their preferred perch locations in the trees, and had to spend more time on the ground. The population size plummeted, and the anoles that had longer legs and were therefore better at running on the flat ground were more likely to survive. As the researchers predicted, after a few years the average leg length in the population was somewhat longer than the average leg length before the invasion. The short-limbed losers had been weeded out by natural selection.
I find this interesting, from an ecological perspective. But, once again, it does not add anything new to the debate about evolution. Nobody doubts that natural selection can change a population. What biologists like Michael Behe doubt is that such selective pressure has limitless potential, to the point of even constructing whole new organs and body plans. That’s where the mathematical difficulties seems to show up: if a new bodily feature requires foresight to construct (because the adaptive function only appears after multiple requisite feature are in place and working in unison), then “evolution by means of national selection and random variation” would be no better at constructing it than pure “random variation” would be.
The anole study, while interesting, has nothing to offer regarding that problem.
If anything, it fits the predictions of the opposing camp. The researchers write that after they observed initial change, they expected to see leg length continue to increase. Yet, so far, it hasn’t. It seems that the anole evolution has hit a bump in the road.
Perhaps, as the researchers are currently predicting, leg length will resume its increase after a few more years. Be that that as it may, I am making the prediction that however long the anoles’ legs become, they will never turn into something more sophisticated than legs.
I am confident in this prediction, because, in spite of all the times evolution has been caught “in action,” no experiment or observation has ever falsified Behe’s key prediction: because natural selection lacks foresight and is not a true designer, it invariably runs out of power before it can construct anything new.
In Conclusion
So, what is the verdict?
As we established, for an observation to constitute a meaningful contribution to the evolution debate, it needs to show evolution’s constructive power, because that is the aspect of evolution that is under debate. Yet, consistently, the observations don’t show that. Instead, they fall into three categories: observations of (1) traits that were already present in the population, (2) traits that were already present in the genome, but were unexpressed, and (3) genuine novelties which, however, did not increase the design sophistication of the organism.
Notes
For example, molecular biologist Michael Behe has (in)famously pointed out that although Darwin’s mechanism of random variation and natural selection can explain a lot, it has trouble explaining exactly what most needs explaining: the kind of intricately complex structures that characterize life. These structures need many components carefully in place before they can confer any survival advantage at all, so the mechanism of natural selection could not have done any good until the very end of the construction process. More recently, Behe has argued that natural selection should be expected to decrease complexity over time, on average, rather than increase it, because (a) loss and damage of sophisticated systems can sometimes confer a survival advantage, and (b) loss and destruction is always vastly more probably than construction.
