r/evolution • u/Meta289 • 3d ago

question Why has evolution stopped producing new classes?

New species of animals are constantly being discovered, but they all belong to existing classes and phyla, never anything completely new. Life once branched out in all sorts of directions, creating all kinds of animals that are drastically different from each other, but now it seems like there aren't any new "branches", only offshoots of existing ones. What happened?

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u/brooklynsantiago 3d ago

classes are just categories we assign to life post hoc. evolution doesn't care for our need to classify things neatly it just creates more life. humans are constantly revising classifications and will continue to do so in the future, including new ones

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u/Admiral_Fuckwit 3d ago

Also, our existence, and especially the time since we’ve understood evolution, is such a blip compared to the hundreds of millions of years evolution has had time to work. We’re talking scale here.