I want to make a correction. I am a creationist. I just don't believe God
created the way that many Christians think He did. But, there is some
truth in the claim that my views might be affecting me here. However, there
is recent data that does fuzzy up the Cambrian/Precambrian boundary as far
as paleontology is concerned. Christians can't blindly claim that all these
groups appeared at one and the same time, in the early cambrian any more.
>
>The fauna of most interest--vertebrates and arthropods--seem so
>biomechanically tied to their hard parts, it's impossible to
>conceive their evolving as soft-bodied organisms, and then later
>donning suits of armor or gaining rigid internal struts.
Now your beliefs are driving your conclusions rather than the evidence. I
cite again the apparent soft-bodied mollusc from the precambrian.
"We conclude that Kimberella is a bilaterian metazoan, more complex than a
flatworm, more like a mollusc than like any other metazoan, and plausibly
bearing molluscan synapomorphies such as a shell and a foot. This
interpretation counters assertions that the Ediacara biota represents an
extinct grade of non-metazoan life. It confirms hypotheses based on trace
fossils that metazoan triploblastic lineages, including 'molluscan-grade
bilaterians', began to diversify before the beginning of the Cambrian. It
also suggests a pre-Ediacaran origin of major metazoan clades." ~ Mickhail
A. Fedonkin and Benjamin M. Waggoner, "The Late Precambrian Fossil
Kimberella is a Mollusc-like Bilaterian Organism," Nature,
388(1997):868-871, p. 871
>
>As an evolutionist who embraces the Cambrian explosion as an
>obvious fact, and who seeks to explain it scientifically, it's
>frustrating to be accused of being a creationist. And it's
>depressing to see scientists run from the truth because it
>happens to bear some similarity to an unscientific myth.
I apologize if I mischaracterized your position. First off, your posts as I
recall them have been all over the place. I have never really understood
exactly what it is that you belive. Maybe a primer in your beliefs would
help. Secondly, I am not running from the explosion because it is an
unscientific myth (obviously you don't know my views very well). I am
trying to point out that it is incorrect for Christians to use the Cambrian
explosion as some sort of point in time that ALL creatures came into
existence. That is incorrect, yet you will find the explosion treated in
essentially this fasion.
>
>My hope is that the Cambrian explosion will be explained to the
>satisfaction of scientists, and that creationists will take some
>comfort in seeing that pure Dawkinsian gradualism is wrong, and
>that the author of Genesis had a little more naturalistic insight
>than he is given credit for.
In this we could agree.
glenn
Adam, Apes and Anthropology
Foundation, Fall and Flood
& lots of creation/evolution information
http://www.isource.net/~grmorton/dmd.htm