The Next Meeting, 7 PM: Dave Phillipps, M.A. in paleoanthropology from CSUN, will present “Whale Evolution and Design on Porpoise.”
Video at 6 PM The Voyage that Shook the World retraces Darwin’s journey, exploring the places and discoveries crucial to the formulation of his theory.
By Jon Covey, BA, CLS(ASCP)
Edited by Anita Millen, MD, MPH, MA
Quotes
from Darwin’s On the Origin of Species
1859 come from the digitized version
at www.guttenberg.org.
“The Cambrian explosion was the most remarkable and puzzling event in the history of life”—Stephen Jay Gould, (1994) “The Evolution of Life on Earth,” Scientific American, 271:85-91, October.
The Cambrian explosion continues to be an enigma to evolutionists for good reasons. It does not square with their belief that life originated in a primordial sea as a single-celled organism that evolved into the myriad life forms seen in the fossil record and living organisms. There should have been innumerable intermediate links. Darwin asked,
“Firstly, why, if species have descended from other species by insensibly fine gradations, do we not everywhere see innumerable transitional forms? Why is not all nature in confusion instead of the species being, as we see them, well defined?”
He answered this problem by saying that the fossil record is imperfect, but even so, there should have been numerous, transitional forms that were not well defined species. If evolution is true, they should have been the majority of all fossils as Darwin said. It is absurd to think that the only time organisms were fossilized was when they were fully differentiated. Yet this is what evolutionists seem to believe. They offer only a paltry few fossils they claim to be intermediates.
Creationists, in contrast, believe the Genesis Flood created most of the fossil record. In the Flood, animals that lived in the same environment tended to die and get buried together.
Most paleontologists believe complex life forms evolved on earth about 530 million years ago. They call this period the Cambrian. At 22, Charles Darwin studied Cambrian fossils with Adam Sedgwick long before he wrote The Origin of Species. He never reconciled his theory with the Cambrian fossils. Sedgwick never accepted Darwin’s theory and spoke against it.
Evolutionists used to excuse the lack of ancestral forms prior to the Cambrian on the belief that previous life forms were all soft bodied and didn’t leave fossils, but discoveries in the last 20 years show that many types of life forms existed before the Cambrian period, none of which are reasonable ancestral candidates for those in the Cambrian. In one amazing find the cellular details of tiny embryos can be clearly seen.
In Illustra’s video, Darwin’s Dilemma, Simon Conway Morris, an outstanding paleontologist, describes the Cambrian explosion as “an enormous diversification, a radiation, so that in the Cambrian what we have is an abrupt appearance of animals.”
As an important aside, R.G. McConnell visited the Mt. Stephen Trilobite Beds in 1886 looking for the stone bugs he had been told about. There are billions of trilobites high up on the slopes of Mt. Stephen. It is not unusual to find Cambrian fossil beds high on mountains around the world. Both evolutionists and creationists admit that the Cambrian rocks found on these mountain peaks resulted from mountains rising up. Evolutionists say mountain building is a slow process, but the Bible says the mountain building took place rapidly as the Flood waters receded.
Psalm 104:6-8 succinctly describes the tremendous tectonic upheaval at the end of the Flood:
“The waters were standing above the mountains. At Your rebuke they fled, at the sound of Your thunder they hurried away. The mountains rose, the valleys sank down.”
Charles Walcott, Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution in 1910, discovered the soft-bodied fossils of the Burgess shale. This effectively refutes Darwin’s “extreme imperfection” contention that a fossiliferous geological record prior to the Cambrian didn’t exist because the Precambrian fossils were soft-bodied (see his long quote pp. 2-3 below).
Geologists believe an avalanche quickly buried the Burgess animals alive in an airtight tomb, which prevented the decay of soft body parts—eyes, legs, and internal organs. Simon Conway Morris says the alimentary canals and their contents can be seen in some of the worm fossils, indicating how well these soft, delicate parts were preserved. The sediments of the Burgess shale had to be deposited rapidly to preserve the fine structures seen by Morris and others. Morris explained how some organisms had darkly stained areas, which were the result of partial decomposition and body fluids leaking out into the sedimentary matrix. The burial of these organisms had to be extremely rapid and protected from oxygen, otherwise these delicate details would not have survived.
“Nothing distressed Darwin more than the Cambrian Explosion.” Stephen Jay Gould The Panda’s Thumb, p. 238
Modern biology rests on Darwin’s twin pillars of common descent and natural selection. The branching tree of life was his greatest icon, which nearly every biology textbook depicts.
“There is another and allied difficulty, which is much graver. I allude to the manner in which numbers of species of the same group, suddenly appear in the lowest known fossiliferous rocks. Most of the arguments which have convinced me that all the existing species of the same group have descended from one progenitor, apply with nearly equal force to the earliest known species.” Darwin
In September 2000 meeting, Art Battson gave us an outstanding presentation on the Cambrian explosion from his series The Origin of Stasis. The tree, shown in Fig. 1, indicates the discontinuity Darwin fretted over. Battson belongs to a excellent organization called Access Research Network: www.arn.org. There’s a great deal of information available on their website.
In chapter 9 of his book, Darwin remarked:
I enumerated the chief objections which might be justly urged against the views maintained in this volume. Most of them have now been discussed. One, namely the distinctness of specific forms, and their not being blended together by innumerable transitional links, is a very obvious difficulty. I assigned reasons why such links do not commonly occur at the present day, under the circumstances apparently most favourable for their presence, namely on an extensive and continuous area with graduated physical conditions. I endeavoured to show, that the life of each species depends in a more important manner on the presence of other already defined organic forms, than on climate; and, therefore, that the really governing conditions of life do not graduate away quite insensibly like heat or moisture. I endeavoured, also, to show that intermediate varieties, from existing in lesser numbers than the forms which they connect, will generally be beaten out and exterminated during the course of further modification and improvement. The main cause, however, of innumerable intermediate links not now occurring everywhere throughout nature depends on the very process of natural selection, through which new varieties continually take the places of and exterminate their parent-forms. But just in proportion as this process of extermination has acted on an enormous scale, so must the number of intermediate varieties, which have formerly existed on the earth, be truly enormous. Why then is not every geological formation and every stratum full of such intermediate links? Geology assuredly does not reveal any such finely graduated organic chain; and this, perhaps, is the most obvious and gravest objection which can be urged against my theory. The explanation lies, as I believe, in the extreme imperfection of the geological record.”
This lengthy quote explains much about Darwin’s mentality and how willing he was to champion his theory even though the available evidence was against it. With a little flimflammery of scientism, Darwin and his modern students have slid past the chief objections to his theory. Information contrary to their belief will simply be ignored because they hope that eventually discoveries will be made that will justify their apparently blind faith. The objections that Darwin himself raised need to be raised again in light of continued fossil collecting around the world.
One chief objection Darwin missed and one which no one else has confirmed is the process Darwin suggests took place to generate a mammal from its supposed invertebrate ancestors. This is what he was asking his readers to trust him about, not just the minute variations within a species that can be achieved by husbandry. There are dubious mammal-like reptile fossils and creatures like Archeopteryx for the birds for transitional examples, but attempting to trace them from their invertebrate ancestry is highly speculative.
We can, however, challenge the supposed “extreme imperfection” of the fossil record. The fossil record is essentially complete and perfect. Paleontologists are still finding odds and ends, but what we see among the 250,000 fossil species and millions of fossils inhabiting museum storage bins around the world is what we would expect to find as the aftermath of the worldwide Genesis Flood, namely billions of “well-defined species” laid down in rock layers everywhere.
These are multicellular organisms named for a locality in Australia, but found throughout the world. From Stephen Jay Gould’s Wonderful Life, these organisms were:
Gould wrote:
“In one sense, the Ediacara fauna poses more problems than it solves for Darwin’s resolution of the Cambrian explosion. The most promising version of the “imperfection theory” holds that the Cambrian explosion only may have undergone a long history of gradually ascending complexity leaving no record in the rocks because we have found no “Burgess Shale,” or soft-bodied fauna, for the Precambrian….Thus, instead of Darwin’s gradual rise to mounting complexity, the 100 million years from Ediacara to Burgess may have witnessed three radically different faunas—the large pancake-flat soft-bodied Ediacara creatures, the tiny cups and caps of the Tommotian, and finally the modern fauna, culminating in the maximal anatomical range of the Burgess. Nearly 2.5 billion years of prokaryotic cells and nothing else—two-thirds of life’s history in stasis at the lowest level of recorded complexity. Another 700 million years of the larger and much more intricate eukaryotic cells, but no aggregation to multicellular animal life.” (pp. 59-60)
Despite all this, evolutionists sincerely believe in the fictitious history of descent from a common ancestor by whatever mode. Denial is amazing in how it blinds the intellect. If evolution were true, there should be innumerable transitional fossils. Each favored micro-step mutant to the next species should have been superior to its ancestral stock and inferior to the next-step descendent, the ever-evolving line becoming increasingly more fit and well-defined. That’s how variation and natural selection are supposed to work.