This apparent stasis, in turn, gives rise to a great deal of confusion — for one thing, the fossil record seldom preserves much more than the general morphology of a specimen. To determine much about its physiology is seldom possible; not even the most dramatic examples of living fossils can be expected to be without changes, no matter how persistently constant their fossils and the extant specimens might seem. To determine much about noncoding DNA is hardly ever possible, but even if a species were hypothetically unchanged in its physiology, it is to be expected from the very nature of the reproductive processes, that its non-functional genomic changes would continue at more-or-less standard rates. Hence, a fossil lineage with apparently constant "morphology" need not imply equally constant "physiology", and certainly neither implies any cessation of the basic evolutionary processes such as natural selection, nor reduction in the usual rate of change of the noncoding DNA.