I’m familiar with the SJ Gould quote, though I would expect you to assume it was untrue because he is one who “believes” as you put it. Although he is talking of stasis at the species level, the same is true of higher taxonomic groupings, as you can see from the chart. If I had included unicellular organisms in it, you would see that most of earth’s history was dominated by them, with no other form of life appearing until relatively “recent” times. As it is, you can see that major groups existed for tens or hundreds of millions of years before other major groups spun off of them.

One other note about SJ Gould’s comments… although he was not a creationist by any stretch of the imagination, these words of his (made in an argument against the doctrine of gradualism, in favor of “punctuated equilibrium” in evolution - a matter that is still debated now among biologists and paleontologists concerning the pace of evolution) are often quoted by creationists.

The creationists’ hope here is that their audience will be unfamiliar with the fossil record and unfamiliar with the meaning and context of Gould’s words, and so will draw their impression of what the fossil record says from those words, rather than from the evidence itself. In short, they hope to use that quote to create distorted ideas about the fossil record in their audience’s mind. My task is to get the reader familiar enough with the fossil record, that mined quotes from some authority will not be the primary source of their impression of it. This first post was one step toward that.

I’m not writing these to argue with creationists who are seeking to distort the evidence. I’m writing this to present the evidence so that it is too clear in the reader’s mind to be distorted by professional snake-oil men.

I guess life is life is life is life.

Interesting topic. I watched a special on History or Science channel the other night which was going to show how life was formed but right at the most important moment I found out that life was formed behind a curtain that the narrator had no access to.

It kinda pissed me off.

Yes, UCD claims that all life, no matter what type, evolved from some single population of single celled organisms in the dimmest mists of time. No, that doesn’t mean that we evolved from ferns. The last common ancestor of any animal and any plant would have been a single celled eukaryote of some sort. We and ferns are cousins, not grandparent-grandchildren. We can claim a certain number of fish as ancestors, though - as well as some worm-looking organisms that preceded the fish, and eventually some single-celled organisms that were perhaps similar to paramecia. To find the last common ancestor between us and ferns, you have to look to around the time of that paramecium-like ancestor.

Stupid question number one and two.

The chart seems to be saying that fish are older than plants. I am sure that is not the case and maybe I just can’t read the chart.

Does UCD claim and all life no matter what type evolved from some single life cell that came into being someway sometime in the distant past?

In other words, are humans descendants of ferns?

/puts head down on desk and prepares for the inevitable mockery /