DAMNED NUISANCES

Army Ants Have Defied Evolution For 100 Million Years (Space Daily, 5/12/03)

Army ants, nature's ultimate coalition task force, strike their prey en masse in a blind, voracious column and pay no attention to the conventional wisdom of evolutionary biologists.

The common scientific belief has been that army ants originated separately on several continents over millions of years. Now it is found there was no evolution. Using fossil data and the tools of a genetics detective, a Cornell University entomologist has discovered that these ants come from the same point of origin, because since the reign of the dinosaurs, about 100 million years ago, army ants in essence have not changed a bit.

Fortunately, if you're an evolutionist, you just pretend that they're perfectly adapted and ignore all the changes that have occurred around them in those 100 million years, which you might otherwise think they should have responded to, at least a smidge. Posted by Orrin Judd at May 17, 2003 6:27 AM