The giant tortoise, the bowhead whale, and the Greenland shark are three of the longest-lived vertebrates. As we will see, the facts about them make the evolutionary narrative even harder for materialists to justify.

The oldest living tortoise in the world, called Jonathan, is believed to have hatched from an egg in 1832, though that is only an estimate. That makes him about 193 years old (in 2025), and he is thought to be the oldest living land animal.

What does such longevity mean for belief in the evolution narrative? If animals are able to sow their genetic information into the gene pool over hundreds of years, with lengthened generations, then it would only increase the difficulty for evolution to occur. Famous evolutionary biologist J.B.S. Haldane (1892–1964) pointed out that larger, slow-breeding vertebrates, such as cattle, cannot hope to pay the cost of neo-Darwinian evolution through random mutations and natural selection.

The cost (i.e., of substituting a gene) may be stated as follows. Consider a breeding population in which a supposedly beneficial mutation arises. For that mutated gene to spread to become dominant in the population, a large number of individuals without that mutation must first die (in that and succeeding generations) without leaving offspring. Haldane’s ‘working number’ for these deaths was 30 times the population size.

Four factors that can lower the number of such deaths are higher selection pressures, higher mutation rates, faster population turnover, and smaller populations. Haldane cited a theoretical low of around 10–20 times the population size. But he said it could be higher than the 30 he used in his calculations, in rare circumstances, even as high as 100. Nonetheless, 30 is generally taken as a reasonable estimate for most situations.

This theoretical cost is grossly unrealistic; for a population of only 1,000 animals, it would mean 30,000 nonreproductive deaths must first happen over time. This is an unacceptable cost for the species to bear. And for larger populations, the number of such deaths would be higher still. This long-recognized problem is known as Haldane’s Dilemma. And there is no solution in sight.

There is also another issue to consider, called Peto’s Paradox. Large vertebrates have many more cells than small animals, which suggests a higher risk of mutations in body cells (called somatic mutations, which are not inherited). Also, the longer a creature lives, the higher the chance of the DNA in an individual cell mutating. Such mutations can lead to cancer and early death. So, the larger, longer-lived vertebrates should have a greater risk of cancer.

But the evidence is the reverse; it would seem they actually have a lower risk of cancer, perhaps due to one or more effective DNA repair mechanisms. The presence of cell repair mechanisms is actually evidence of design, not evolution. Slow-breeding animals such as the bowhead whale are evidently not dying young through disease, further reinforcing the dilemma that Haldane highlighted.

Another problem is why natural selection (i.e., differential reproduction) over millions of hypothetical years would ever cause such longevity to evolve. There is no reproductive advantage, as evolution requires, for a mutation that keeps a creature alive long after it has stopped reproducing.