Epoch Times - Small changes don’t explain big biological leaps

April 20, 2026 - Epoch Times

02:20

Small changes don’t explain big biological leaps

Small changes don't explain big biological leaps, as mutation and natural selection effectively account for minor variations like peppered moth color shifts or finch beak adjustments but fail to generate major morphological innovations. Prominent biologists, citing a 2016 Royal Society conference, argue the standard model lacks creative power to explain abrupt origins of new body plans, organs, and tissues found in fossils. Ultimately, this distinction reveals that while natural selection handles incremental adaptation, it cannot fully account for significant evolutionary leaps without a revised theoretical framework. [Automatically generated summary]
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Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo

Time	Text
Limits of Natural Selection 00:02:20
	Is that there's a huge difference between the idea that natural selection is a real process that takes place and the claim that natural selection acting on random variations and mutations has unlimited creative power.
	It can be a process that is a real part of biological phenomena without necessarily having unlimited creative power.
	And many leading evolutionary biologists today are now calling for a new theory of evolution because they recognize that the mutation natural selection mechanism has limited creative.
	Power, quite limited creative power.
	I attended a conference in 2016, now 10 years ago, at the Royal Society in London that was convened by a group of biologists and evolutionary biologists who have been calling for a new theory of evolution precisely because they realize that the mechanism of mutation and selection has such limited power, that it does a nice job of explaining small scale variation and adaptation.
	All the classic examples that we learn about in the biology textbooks, the same ones that are repeated over and over again.
	Fairly limited number of these, but the peppered moths that change coloration from dark to light and dark again, or maybe it's the other way around, the Galapagos finches with the beaks that get a little bigger, a little smaller, and change shape in response to varying food supplies and weather patterns, antibiotic resistance, and so forth.
	Natural selection does a nice job of explaining that small scale variation, but it doesn't do a good job of explaining.
	The origin of what biologists call morphological innovation, the origin of major new body plans or new forms, new organs, new tissues, but especially new body plans in the history of life.
	That we find again and again in the fossil record, that kind of morphological innovation occurs very abruptly.
	And the mechanism of natural selection does not explain that well, it runs out of capability very quickly.
	So we can talk more about why that's the case.
	The distinction between just the fact of a mechanism that does something and the claim that it can do everything is often overlooked, that distinction.

Time

Text

Limits of Natural Selection 00:02:20

Is that there's a huge difference between the idea that natural selection is a real process that takes place and the claim that natural selection acting on random variations and mutations has unlimited creative power.

It can be a process that is a real part of biological phenomena without necessarily having unlimited creative power.

And many leading evolutionary biologists today are now calling for a new theory of evolution because they recognize that the mutation natural selection mechanism has limited creative.

Power, quite limited creative power.

I attended a conference in 2016, now 10 years ago, at the Royal Society in London that was convened by a group of biologists and evolutionary biologists who have been calling for a new theory of evolution precisely because they realize that the mechanism of mutation and selection has such limited power, that it does a nice job of explaining small scale variation and adaptation.

All the classic examples that we learn about in the biology textbooks, the same ones that are repeated over and over again.

Fairly limited number of these, but the peppered moths that change coloration from dark to light and dark again, or maybe it's the other way around, the Galapagos finches with the beaks that get a little bigger, a little smaller, and change shape in response to varying food supplies and weather patterns, antibiotic resistance, and so forth.

Natural selection does a nice job of explaining that small scale variation, but it doesn't do a good job of explaining.

The origin of what biologists call morphological innovation, the origin of major new body plans or new forms, new organs, new tissues, but especially new body plans in the history of life.

That we find again and again in the fossil record, that kind of morphological innovation occurs very abruptly.

And the mechanism of natural selection does not explain that well, it runs out of capability very quickly.

So we can talk more about why that's the case.

The distinction between just the fact of a mechanism that does something and the claim that it can do everything is often overlooked, that distinction.