“The Cambrian Explosion has uprooted Darwin’s tree.” Jonathan Wells, Ph.D.
I began reading Lee Strobel’s The Case for a Creator about a week ago, and I’ve started investigating some of the evidence presented. Right now I’m reading about the “Cambrian Explosion”. The article is working so hard to maintain a materialist perspective that I have to give the writer credit and highlight the true achievements. The format for this post will be a quote from the article, followed by a comment from yours truly.
First I’ll explain what we’re dealing with. Up until about 540 million years ago, all that existed were jellyfish, sea urchins, and sponges. There were plenty of single celled organisms, but who really cares about them? Anyway, suddenly over a period of about 20 million years (or 80, depending on your source), an enormous diversification of animal life occurred. The article says “evolution would accelerate by an order of magnitude.” Sounds pretty fast.
To a Christian, this sounds like God creating the animals. Let’s see what others have to say:
The Cambrian explosion is special because the fossil record apparently shows that almost all of the phyla which provide the vast majority of fossils appeared in the first 20 to 30M years of the Cambrian – molluscs, arthropods, brachiopods, echinoderms, hemichordata and chordata…So at first sight a wide range of complex animals evolved from “blobs” in under 30M years.
Sure, 30M seems like a long time, at least a half-hour longer than Babel. For those of you thinking that this is a tick in the red corner, the writer has some news for you:
But the word “phylum” does not describe a fundamental division of nature (not like the difference between electrons and protons). It simply refers to a very high level in the classification system created by Linnaeus in the 18th century to describe all the animals which are alive to-day.
I guess the basic argument is that the word is useless because it wasn’t invented back then. What’s that you say? There weren’t people back then? Not important.
It seems that people are running out of ways to make the conservative Christian position seem absurd, so they’ve decided to take a red pen to the dictionary. For more evidence consider the now derogatory meanings of “evangelical” or “fundamentalist” (despite their original definitions), or the Emergent adjustments of simple words like “theology”, “church”, and “evangelism”. Here it sounds ridiculous even with the questionable meaning:
This system is not perfect even for modern animals: different books quote different numbers of phyla, mainly because they disagree about the classification of a huge number of worm-like species…the last common ancestor of arthropods and molluscs was neither an arthropod nor a mollusc, and probably did not belong to any modern phylum – but would have been about as complex as an arthropod or mollusc.
Even if you put the worms in one phyla, that’s not going to change the fact that the diversified ancestors of crabs and snails and starfish and sharks appeared at the same time. And of course the last common ancestor or arthropods and molluscs wasn’t either one (if there was a common ancestor at all), the two phyla didn’t exist yet!
Further insights were provided by the work on North American fauna by Walcott, who proposed that an interval of time, or the “Lipalianâ€, was not represented in the fossil record, or did not preserve fossils, and that the ancestral forms to the Cambrian taxa evolved during this time.
I like how this is called “insight”. It’s a very generous description. And people say it’s “convenient” that God is immaterial and so can’t be detected by science. The best way to explain this is to say that all the ancestors of these phyla evolved according to the theory but left no fossils? How is that not pointed at as the purely speculative excuse-making that it is?
If the process really took about 10M years, that would mean that all the known phyla (major types of animals) emerged from nowhere in an astonishingly short time. We would have to find explanations for why this evolution was so fast, why it accelerated so abruptly and and why it slowed down to a more “normal” pace; and we might even have to look for some extraordinary “one time only” mechanism.
Now the best way to explain it is to say that this completely natural thing happened, creating an explosion of highly complex, differentiated life, but just the one time, and for no reason at all. The sad thing about it is that so many people have been or will be convinced that this explanation would be more plausible than God.
But some were probably early forms of the phyla at the heart of the debate about the “Cambrian explosion”. Kimberella was very probably a mollusc (see below). Spriggina was probably a trilobite and therefore an arthropod.[25] Arkarua was probably an echinoderm, although it lacked a feature present in later echinoderms (stereom, a unique crystalline form of calcium carbonate from which their skeletons are built).[26]
How many times a person can use the worlds “might”, “possibly”, and “probably” without people realizing that he’s just guessing?
The earliest Cambrian trilobite fossils are about 530M years old, but even then they were quite diverse and world-wide, which suggests that these arthropods had been around for quite some time…The earliest generally-accepted echinoderms appeared at about the same time, although it has been suggested that some Ediacaran organisms were echinoderms…
Let’s add “suggests” to the list. Why can’t the fact that trilobites were “quite diverse and world-wide” suggest that they were created that way? Because as a “dyed-in-the-wool” materialist (borrowing a phrase from Dawkins), there must be a scientific answer, no matter how contrived. No evidence can be against it.
More recently and spectacularly, many molecular clock estimates place the origin of bilaterian animals well before the beginning of the Cambrian, perhaps more than 1 billion years ago…As a result, hypothetical Proterozoic bilaterians are usually thought to be some combination of tiny (planktonic or meiofaunal), immobile in sediment (e.g. sessile or planktonic) and without hard parts.[43] In theory, such hypotheses can be tested by phylogenetic reconstruction of the morphology of the most basal bilaterians.
So, not only are we taking this guess that the animals were in the bathroom getting ready for a half-million years before they finally came out (late for dinner, as always), but we can actually test the legitimacy of these “hypothetical” animals without any evidence whatsoever? How can a person say that with a straight face while at the same time believing that Intelligent Design Theory is an “argument from ignorance”? (To be fair, I don’t know what this particular guy thinks about Intelligent Design, but I’m still asking the question.)
Understanding why the Cambrian explosion happened when it did revolves around three major themes: i) extrinsic forcing events such as environmental change; ii) intrinsic mechanisms such as the acquisition of complex genomes; and iii) intrinsic mechanisms such as the natural consequences of metazoan ecology.
I like this one because, of three options, one requires an intelligent, transcendent being. What else could the “complex genomes” have been acquired from?
Everything I read in that article leads me to the conclusion that this event took place, and there is no stream (or shred) of evidence that suggests any answer that would fit into the realm of scientific materialism. So they started making stuff up. They call them “hypotheses” and “theories” and “suggestions”, but the last time I said “probably” that much was trying to explain to my mom how her vase broke even though I wasn’t playing soccer in the living room.
This is your friendly, neighborhood skeptic reminding you not to doubt the evidence, just the explanation.
The great (slight exaggeration) experiment is over. The short reason is that we couldn’t get along. It may be for the best though, because it was bound to be nothing but…well, an argument. That’s not necessarily bad, but, I’ll admit, I tend to go for the throat. Sometimes sarcastic, sometimes aggressive, always on point.
