On Fri, 25 Oct 1996 23:03:40 -0500, John E. Rylander wrote:
>JR>WASHINGTON (AP) -- A new study pushes back by hundreds of
>millions of years the start of the evolutionary process that led
>from tiny squishy creatures in the ocean to the wide diversity of
>species, including humans, now in the animal kingdom.
[...]
JR>The animals that first began to divide into the different phyla,
>or species types, were fragile and not likely to leave a fossilized
>imprint in rock that was then forming, Levinton said. "The early
>representatives of the animal groups were probably very small and
>soft-bodied and not very preservable," he said. "It is probably
>that what existed were little squishy things that didn't have many
>of the characteristics of the modern animal groups."
[...]
This is the popular "soft-bodied" theory which many eveolutionists,
including Dawkins, use to to explain the lack of Pre-Cambrian
fossils:
"...the Cambrian strata of rocks, vintage about 600 million years,
are the oldest ones in which we find most of the major invertebrate
groups. And we find many of them already in an advanced state of
evolution, the very first time they appear. It is as though they
were just planted there, without any evolutionary history. Needless
to say, this appearance of sudden planting has delighted
creationists. Evolutionists of all stripes believe, however, that
this really does represent a very large gap in the fossil record, a
gap that is simply due to the fact that, for some reason, very few
fossils have lasted from periods before about 600 million years ago.
One good reason might be that many of these animals had only soft
parts to their bodies: no shells or bones to fossilize." (Dawkins
R., "The Blind Watchmaker, Penguin: London, 1991, pp229-230)
But Gish rightly points out that if it is possible to find fossils of
single-celled bacteria and algae in Pre-Cambrian rocks, it should not
be hard to find fossils of soft bodied invertebrates:
"The rocks that generally underlie the Cambrian rocks are simply
called Precambrian rocks. Some are thousands of feet thick, and many
are undisturbed-perfectly suitable for the preservation of fossils.
If it is possible to find fossils of microscopic, single-celled,
soft-bodied bacteria and algae, it should certainly be possible to
find fossils of the transitional forms between those organisms and
the complex invertebrates. Many billions times billions of the
intermediates would have lived and died during the vast stretch of
time required for the evolution of such a diversity of complex
organisms. The world's museums should be bursting at the seams with
enormous collections of the fossils of transitional forms. As a
matter of fact, not a single such fossil has ever been found! Right
from the start, jellyfish have been jellyfish, trilobites have been
trilobites, sponges have been sponges, and snails have been snails.
Furthermore, not a single fossil has been found linking, say, clams
and snails, sponges and jellyfish, or trilobites and crabs, yet all
of the Cambrian animals supposedly have derived from common
ancestors." (Gish D.T., "Creation Scientists Answer Their Critics",
Institute for Creation Research: El Cajon CA, 1993, pp115-116)
Gould indirectly agrees with Gish, by pointing out that that
fossil records have been left by prokaryotes from 3 bya, eukaryotes
from 1.4 bya, and soft-bodied invertebrates (the Ediacaran fauna)
from 0.7 bya, but not the Cambrian fauna:
"Darwin has been vindicated by a rich Precambrian record, all
discovered in the past thirty years. Yet the peculiar character of
this evidence has not matched Darwin's prediction of a continuous
rise in complexity toward Cambrian life, and the problem of the
Cambrian explosion has remained as stubborn as ever-if not more so,
since our confusion now rests on knowledge, rather than ignorance,
about the nature of Precambrian life....just as chemical evidence for
life may appear in the first rocks capable of providing it,
morphological remains are also as old as they could possibly be.
Both stromatolites (mats of sediment trapped and bound by bacteria
and blue-green algae) and actual cells have been found in the earth's
oldest unmetamorphosed sediments, dating to 3.5-3.6 billion years in
Africa and Australia...Such a simple beginning would have pleased
Darwin, but the later history of Precambrian life stands strongly
against his assumption of a long and gradual rise in complexity
toward the products of the Cambrian explosion. For 2.4 billion years
after the Isua sediments, or nearly two-thirds of the entire history
of life on earth, all organisms were single-celled creatures of the
simplest, or prokaryotic, design...The advent of eukaryotic cells in
the fossil record some 1.4 billion years ago marks a major increment
in life's complexity....The Precambrian record does contain one fauna
of multicellular animals preceding the Cambrian explosion, the
Ediacara fauna, named for a locality in Australia but now known from
rocks throughout the world. But this fauna can offer no comfort to
Darwin's expectation...the Ediacara is barely Precambrian in age.
These animals are found exclusively in rocks just predating the
explosion, probably no more than 700 million years old and perhaps
younger....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 marks the appearance of hard parts in the fossil
record....but it cannot provide a full explanation...For the Ediacara
creatures are soft-bodied, and they are not confined to some odd
enclave stuck away in a peculiar Australian environment; they
represent a world-wide fauna. So if the true ancestors of Cambrian
creatures lacked hard parts, why have we not found them in the
abundant deposits that contain the soft- bodied Ediacara fauna?"
(Gould S.J., "Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of
History", Penguin: London, 1991, pp57-59)
Gould point out that there are two basic theories to account for
the lack of Cambrian ancestors:m the "artifact theory" and
the "fast-transition theory":
"Two different kinds of explanations for the absence of Precambrian
ancestors have been debated for more than a century: the artifact
theory (they did exist, but the fossil record hasn't preserved them),
and the fast-transition theory (they really didn't exist, at least as
complex invertebrates easily linked to their descendants, and the
evolution of modern anatomical plans occurred with a rapidity that
threatens our usual ideas about the stately pace of evolutionary
change)." (Gould, 1991, p, pp270-272)
Because of the inadequacy of the "artifact theory" Gould proposes the
"fast-transition theory" in its place:
"We can now understand why Walcott was virtually compelled to propose
the Burgess shoehorn. He interpreted his new fauna in the light of
thirty previous years spent (largely in frustration) trying to prove
the artifact theory, as an ultimate tribute to Darwin from a Cambrian
geologist. He could not grant Burgess organisms the uniqueness that
seems so evident to us today because a raft of new phyla would have
threatened his most cherished belief. If evolution could produce ten
new Cambrian phyla and then wipe them out just as quickly, then what
about the surviving Cambrian groups? Why should they have had a long
and honorable Precambrian pedigree? Why should they not have
originated just before the Cambrian, as the fossil record, read
literally, seems to indicate, and as the fast-transition theory
proposes? This argument, of course, is a death knell for the
artifact theory." (Gould, 1991, p273)
But as Johnson has pointed out a "fast-transition" from unicellular
(or even multicellular) organisms to complex invertebrates is not
what Darwinians mean by "evolution":
"A `fast-transition' that produces dozens of complex animal groups
directly from single-cell predecessors, without going through
intermediate steps, may be called "evolution", but not in the sense
implied by the blind watchmaker thesis. Each of those Cambrian
multicellular animals contained a variety of immensely complicated
organ systems. They're just like like insects and lobsters and all of
those kind of things today. Highly complex animal systems. And
each of these would have would have had to evolve independently,
according to the blind watchmaker thesis, by tiny, cumulative steps.
And its not simply that there must be long line of descent from each
Cambrian animal back to its hypothetical single-cell ancestor.
Because Darwinism is assumed to be a purposeless, undirected
process, it could not proceed from a starting point to a destination.
The expectation is that instead of lines of descent you would have a
thick bush with branches going off on each side and to failing and
extinct organs. And so one has to imagine a whole *forest* of
intermediates between the hypothetical animals and each of the later
groups that emerges. As Darwin himself put it, if Darwinism is true
the Precambrian world must have `swarmed with living creatures'
many of them ancestral to the Cambrian animals. So if Gould really
rejects the artifact theory of the Precambrian fossil record, which he
says he does, he also rejects the blind watchmaker thesis." (Johnson
P.E., "The Blind Watchmaker Thesis" , tape 2 of 3, Trinity Founders
Lectures, Access Research Network, Colorado Springs CO, 1992)
Dawkins is right when he says:
"...My point here is that, when we are talking about gaps of this
magnitude, there is no difference whatever in the interpretations of
'punctuationists' and 'gradualists'. Both schools of thought despise
so-called scientific creationists equally, and both agree that the
major gaps are real, that they are true imperfections in the fossil
record. Both schools of thought agree that the only alternative
explanation of the sudden appearance of so many complex animal types
in the Cambrian era is divine creation, and both would reject this
alternative." (Dawkins R., "The Blind Watchmaker, Penguin: London,
1991, pp229-230)
God bless.
Steve
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