> if there’s no selection pressure on the organism, it will not evolve This is (and the article agrees) a statement not compatible with modern evolutionary und

> if there’s no selection pressure on the organism, it will not evolve This is (and the article agrees) a statement not compatible with modern evolutionary understanding. Primary school-level knowledge about biology should be enough to debunk this claim: a set of genes survives if there are organisms that pass those genes on, it's as simple as that. If there is a mutation in a homogenous group of individuals, and that mutation is not lethal or otherwise causes the individual to die before procreation, that mutation survives - selection pressure or not. There are also genomes that remain highly preserved over long stretches of time, which should likewise not be surprising. This occurs even at the gene level: there are genes in all of us pretty much unchanged compared to early eukaryotes, mostly because the proteins they produce work well, but also because mutations to those sequences are generally lethal. While most mutations are lethal, it's not true that the remaining ones are beneficial either. This means there are lots of individuals with sometimes distinctive properties which are still causally disconnected from selection pressure. Anyone who spent some time experimenting with evolutionary models on a computer should know this, because those are intrinsic properties of genetic systems. We expect them to behave that way. We expect ancient versions of organisms to stick around if there was no reason for them to die out. That doesn't mean the reverse is true in the sense that no change in selection pressure leads to genetic stagnation.