While preparing this post, I discovered that Jerry Coyne had also read the review. Today's New York Times Book Review has a review of a new book by Richard Fortey called 'Horseshoe Crabs and Velvet Worms.' The review praises the writing style and readability of the book but, like most science journalism, does not get into details about the accuracy of the text. Why is this important? Because it's wrong to promote incorrect versions of evolutionary theory. I pointed out that some of his statements were misleading and I also explained why horseshoe crabs have evolved according to the scientific evidence. The last time I blogged about this was just a few months ago when I commented on the first episode of a BBC television documentary called 'Survivors.' The main topic of the first episode was ' Horseshoe crabs are one of nature’s great survivors' and the scientist behind the series is Richard Fortey, a paleontologists at the Natural History Museum in London (UK). In other words, the facts are misrepresented. The so-called 'living fossils' show no evidence of morphological change over millions of years when, in fact, all of the popular examples show plenty of evidence of such change.External morphological changes are the only evidence of evolution.Another way of saying this is that some species can be so perfectly adapted to their environment that all changes are selected against and negative selection prevents evolution. If a species isn't adapting by obvious changes over time then it isn't evolving. It plays into the popular misconception that natural selection is synonymous with evolution.This is, of course, impossible by any reasonable definition of evolution, a conclusion that was promoted on talk.origins two decades ago. These so-called ' living fossils' have somehow managed to avoid any changes in the frequencies of alleles in their evolving populations. The general public has been told time and time again that there exist among us certain species that have not evolved for millions of years.

Horseshoe crabs and velvet worms