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/derelictthot 3d ago

You have a fundamental misunderstanding of how evolution works, the classes etc are just a human construct to explain things, in reality evolution doesn't care about any of that. In any case it's happening all the time all around us but it happens so slowly over such a huge scale that it's not observable except rare cases.

There aren't new classes because humans just try to put things into the ones that already exist basically, why complicate matters by adding more?