Introducing Gunter Bechly: insect gap (Introduction)

by David Turell , Friday, August 09, 2024, 17:52 (104 days ago) @ David Turell

No precursors found as yet:

https://evolutionnews.org/2024/08/fossil-friday-the-carboniferous-explosion-of-winged-i...

"There have been three key innovations in the history of insects that contributed to the great success of this group. Those include the origin of wings and flight, the origin of foldable wings (Neoptera), and the origin of complete metamorphosis (Holometabola) (Nicholson et al. 2014). It is truly astonishing that all these three innovations appeared abruptly and very early among the oldest winged insects from the Carboniferous, which also exhibited a great diversity and disparity from the very beginning. I call this the Carboniferous Insect Explosion.

"In the Pennsylvanian (Upper Carboniferous) subperiod between 323-299 million years ago, when the world was forming a single supercontinent Pangaea dominated by vast tropical swamp forests, this large diversity of different winged insect groups appeared suddenly without any known transitional forms in the older Mississippian (Lower Carboniferous) or Devonian strata... According to leading experts, “an insect equivalent of an Archaeopteryx remains elusive”. (my bold)

***

"Last year a new study (Schachat et al. 2023), which reviewed the fossil and molecular evidence for the age of winged insects, fully vindicated the explosive origin of winged insects in the Carboniferous. In their abstract the authors confirmed the stark conflict between molecular clock datings and the fossil record, which requires extensive ghost lineages of unrecorded history.

***

"...the abrupt appearance of winged insects with great diversity and disparity in the Carboniferous period, which we have called the Carboniferous Insect Explosion, is a phenomenon that is highly unexpected under Darwinian assumptions, but well be accommodated within an intelligent design paradigm. It represents just one of the many discontinuities in the history of life that strongly contradict the predictions from a neo-Darwinian theory of evolution. The same pattern is found in almost all groups of organisms, in all geographical regions, and in all periods of Earth’s history. This is clearly a signal in the data and not just noise. It is a signal that tells about a saltational history of life, with a series of bursts of biological creativity that can only be explained with the goal-directed infusion of new information from outside the system. (my bold)

Comment: As Gould noted the biggest secret among paleontologists ae all the large gaps in the fossil record. This account suggests de novo developments in the insect record. Note my first bold: No stem organism. The last bold just above is more evidence of Bechly's acceptance of ID. It seems he is now in the same position as dhw.