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no argument, just a question. There have been species discovered that were though of as long extinct, yet they look the same as appearantly millions of years ago. What is the reasoning for no physical changes in millions of years? just asking, no bashing please.
They didn't need to change, take the ant for instance. Size, colors, etc. may change but the ant trapped in amber is essentially the same as the one in your back yard. Works for them!
no argument, just a question. There have been species discovered that were though of as long extinct, yet they look the same as appearantly millions of years ago. What is the reasoning for no physical changes in millions of years? just asking, no bashing please.
They are probably not, for example bacteria has been present for billions of years but the bacteria of long ago were much simpler and not as specialized to their environment as the ones from today. There are many changes that do not necessarily express themselves physically such as having a different internal pH for enzymes. I believe the coelacanth is a good example of this.
Other reasons might be that their environment has not changed. NS chooses the best traits for survival in a given habitat which means that at one point all other changes in the gene pool will be selected against because the species has become so specialized to its environment that most mutations will not offer any advantage but rather detriments its chances of survival.
What is the reasoning for no physical changes in millions of years?
That's a perfectly reasonable question and I agree with the other posts. There are some organisms that are so perfectly adapted that they have no need to change and in fact we probably couldn't get rid of them if we wanted to. Take the common cockroach, it's stayed the same for millions of years like certain other insects have, and if we nuked the entire planet we couldn't get rid of them. Most of the species that have ever lived are extinct but there are a few hardy survivors who happen to live in a niche in the environment in which they're not at risk from predators and they've also adapted to a wide variety of climates and are living in all parts of the world. Insects have also branched into new species as they've spread around the globe and adapted to local conditions. There are about 3500 species of cockroaches around the world so it's not that there hasn't been evolution taking place, it's just that there's about 50 or 60 species that we're very familiar with because they like to live where humans live and they've been around for millions of years.
I just thought I'd echo some of the other answers by pointing out that species evolve to adapt to their environment, not to "advance" in some metaphysical sense. Sometimes a species has adapted to its environment as far as it can get given basic physical constraints. In that case, so long as the environment remains fairly stable, the species will also, although it might still send off a subpopulation that moves to a different environment and evolves to look very different.
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