RE: Cambrian Explosion in Berkeley
Pim van Meurs (entheta@eskimo.com)
Sat, 20 Feb 1999 12:51:31 -0800Prof. Chen is one of the world's top experts on Cambrian animal fossils.
His main point was that the major animal phyla arose suddenly and fully
formed in the early Cambrian. Since the early Cambrian fauna from
Chengjiang, China, includes soft-bodied animals, the absence of precursors
presents a serious challenge to Darwinian evolution (the usual excuse being
that the precursors were soft-bodied and thus did not fossilize well).
Prof. Chen made his point forcefully and repeatedly, and compared the
seriousness of his challenge to Darwinism with the irreducible complexity
argument of Mike Behe.
"Cool since Mike Behe's arguments have been shown irrelevant this might be a poor choice. Mike claimed that IC systems could not arise gradually and yet people have shown mechanisms through which such systems could arise gradually."
Questions after the lecture were fairly technical, focusing on details of
the fossils described by Prof. Chen. Clearly, no one was eager to tackle
the "challenge to Darwinism" issue.
"Which could be explained by various reasons."