What Darwin Didn't Know - Part 5: The Cambrian Explosion

What if science were to discover that life appeared almost all at once rather than through a gradual step by step process? Would that change your perceptions of the veracity of the Darwinian account which claims that life arose by natural means through a process called Natural Selection over long periods of time?

The Cambrian Explosion is a term defining biology's big bang event whereby 70 or so new animal Phyla suddenly appear in the fossil record without a trace of any ancestral predecessors. Today, something like 30 Phyla exist due to extinction rates. So, we went from 70 Phylum around 530 million years ago to only about 30 today. This is opposite of what Darwin's theory teaches, that life branches up. This is life branching downward, from 70 to 30, or de-evolving = this is evolution occurring in the wrong direction! Yet according to Darwin's theory, each animal evolves with random variations and mutations acted upon by natural selection over long periods of time. Therefore the Cambrian Explosion, an creation event of marine animals "appearing" on the scene roughly 530 million years ago, defies any naturalistic or for that matter Darwinian explanations.

I must admit that the title for this week's study is a bit misleading. You see, Darwin did know about the Cambrian Explosion. Here is a quote from Darwin's work On the Origin of Species:

"There is another and allied difficulty, which is much more serious. I allude to the manner in which species belonging to several of the main divisions of the animal kingdom suddenly appear in the lowest known fossiliferous rocks… To the question why we do not find rich fossiliferous deposits belonging to these assumed earliest periods prior to the Cambrian system, I can give no satisfactory answer."

Darwin here is referring to the fact that prior to the Cambrian era, no complex animal life forms appear in the rock strata of Darwin's time (19th century). It's this absence of any animal fossils leading up to the explosion event which poses a huge problem for the Darwinian model. A later model, called Punctuated Equilibrium, produced by Eldridge and Gould, further exposed the gaps in the fossil record. On November 26th 1978, an article entitled "Missing Believed Nonexistent" appeared in the British newspaper The Guardian Weekly exposing the problems of the gaps in the fossil record.

"If life had evolved into its wondrous profusion of creatures little by little, Dr. Eldridge argues, then one would expect to find fossils of transitional creatures which were a bit like what went before them and a bit like what came after. But no one has yet found any evidence of such transitional creatures. This oddity has been attributed to gaps in the fossil record which gradualists expected to fill when rock strata of the proper age had been found. In the last decade, however, geologists have found rock layers of all divisions of the last 500 million years and no transitional forms were contained in them."

I found an excellent video clip for you which helps better explain the Cambrian Explosion. I highly recommend that you get a copy of the entire DVD = it is called, Icons of Evolution, and

can be purchased at Amazon.com or from www.reasons.org.

Here is the link to the video called Icons of Evolution: The Cambrian Explosion

Here's an excellent article on the subject for further reading:

On the other hand, if life is the result of a creative act of God, one would expect life to appear at proper times suddenly and completely, and with intact, complete ecosystems. Did you know that the Bible speaks of God's creative activity, perhaps even the Cambrian Explosion itself, in Day 5 of the Genesis 1 creation account? Here, I have it for you:

²⁰ And God said, "Let the water teem with living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth across the expanse of the sky." ²¹ So God created the great creatures of the sea and every living and moving thing with which the water teems, according to their kinds, and every winged bird according to its kind. And God saw that it was good.²²God blessed them and said, "Be fruitful and increase in number and fill the water in the seas, and let the birds increase on the earth." ²³ And there was evening, and there was morning—the fifth day.

(by the way, the term "day" as used as the "fifth day" here which is the word "Yom" in hebrew, can be translated a long but finite period of time, certainly longer than a 24 hour period)

I have a question for you at this point. Which takes more faith in your opinion? That evolutionary processes suddenly went into hyperspace and produced all the animal phyla in a relative geological instant, or that the God of the Bible created the marine animals at the appropriate time?

The Cambrian Explosion isn't Darwinian processes in hyper drive. Rather, the Cambrian Explosion is yet another fingerprint of the God of the Bible, preparing the planet for the advent of humanity.

Tune in next week as I talk about the Permian Catastrophe.

Write me if you have any questions and I'll try to answer them for you. Wait, here is another creation account from Psalm 104;

²⁴ How many are your works, O LORD!
In wisdom you made them all;
the earth is full of your creatures.

²⁵ There is the sea, vast and spacious,
teeming with creatures beyond number—
living things both large and small.

Cheers

Tom