Evolution’s Big Bang

Charles Darwin was quite aware that the sudden appearance of animals in the fossil record poses a major problem for his theory, but he hoped that this problem was due only to our insufficient knowledge of an incomplete fossil record, and therefore will dissolve over time with future research. However, 150 years of paleontological exploration after Darwin has made the problem far worse: not for nothing is it called the Cambrian Explosion. All attempts to explain this problem away have failed (Meyer 2013), including the still beloved artifact hypothesis (Bechly 2020).

Nevertheless, evolutionists still hoped that they can somehow squeeze the gradual evolution of the complex animal body plans into the time between the strange Ediacaran biota and the actual Cambrian Explosion. A good example is a study on arthropod origins by Daly et al. (2018). They claimed to have found evidence for a gradual rather than explosive evolution of arthropods, but instead proved the exact opposite (Bechly 2018a). In their study, Daly et al. (2018) had admitted that the recent discovery of Burgess Shale Type Lagerstätten from China and Mongolia demonstrates that animals were absent before 550 million years ago. They also documented trace fossil evidence for trilobite arthropods around 537 million years ago, which leaves only 13 million years for the evolution of complex animal body plans like that of arthropods. This may sound like a long time but actually it is just about as long as the average lifespan of 1-2 successive marine invertebrate species (Levinton 2001). This alone renders a Darwinian scenario almost impossible. But it turns out that even this short time frame vastly overestimated the available window of time.

Recently, I stumbled upon a paper from 2018 that I had previously overlooked, and it proved to be dynamite. It is a study by a research group from the University of Zurich about the transition from the Ediacaran organisms to the Cambrian animal phyla in the Nama Basin of Namibia (Linnemann et al. 2018). What they found is truly mind-blowing. The window of time between the latest appearance date (LAD) of the alien Ediacaran biota and the first appearance date (FAD) of the complex Cambrian biota was only 410,000 years. You read that correctly, just 410 thousand years! This is not an educated guess but based on very precise radiometric U-Pb dating with an error margin of only plus-minus 200 thousand years. This precision is truly a remarkable achievement of modern science considering that we are talking about events 538 million years ago.

The authors of the study fully realized that their finding documents an unexpected “extremely short duration of the faunal transition from Ediacaran to Cambrian biota.” Therefore, they speculated about ecologically driven reasons for this rapid onset of the Cambrian Explosion. Of course, no ecological factors whatsoever could solve the information problem of the origin of the new animal body plans in the Cambrian Explosion, as was elaborated by Stephen Meyer in his book Darwin’s Doubt (Meyer 2013). With this new and very precise time frame, the population genetic waiting time problem for the origin of animal body plans is lifted to a whole new level and suggests that no unguided process could ever plausibly explain these data. The Cambrian Explosion has gone nuclear and simply evaporates neo-Darwinism as a brilliant and beautiful but failed scientific theory, as it was recently called by Yale University professor David Gelernter (2019).

References

Bechly G 2018a. Alleged Refutation of the Cambrian Explosion Confirms Abruptness, Vindicates Meyer. Evolution News May 29, 2018.
Bechly G 2018b. Why Dickinsonia Was Most Probably Not an Ediacaran Animal. Evolution News September 27, 2018.
Bechly G 2020. The Demise of the Artifact Hypothesis. Evolution News July 6, 2020.
Bobrovskiy I, Hope JM, Ivantsov A, Nettersheim BJ, Hallmann C, Brocks JJ 2018b. Ancient steroids establish the Ediacaran fossil Dickinsonia as one of the earliest animals. Science 361(6408), 1246–1249, doi: 10.1126/science.aat7228.
Daley AC, Antcliffe JB, Drage HB, Pates S 2018. Early fossil record of Euarthropoda and the Cambrian Explosion. PNAS 115(21), 5323-5331. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1719962115.
Gelernter D 2019. Giving Up Darwin: A fond farewell to a brilliant and beautiful theory. Claremont Review of Books Spring 2019.
Levinton JS 2001. Genetics, Paleontology, and Macroevolution. Cambridge University Press, 617 pp. (Google Books).
Linnemann U, Ovtcharova M, Schaltegger U, Gärtner A, Hautmann M, Geyer G, Vickers‐Rich P, Rich T, Plessen B, Hofmann M, Zieger J, Krause R, Kriesfeld L, Smith J 2018. New high‐resolution age data from the Ediacaran–Cambrian boundary indicate rapid, ecologically driven onset of the Cambrian explosion. Terra Nova 31(1), 49–58. DOI: 10.1111/ter.12368.
McMenamin MAS 1998. The Garden of Ediacara. Columbia University Press, New York, xii+295 pp. [revised edition 2000, 324 pp.]
Meyer SC 2013. Darwin’s Doubt: The Explosive Origin of Animal Life and the Case for Intelligent Design. HarperOne, vii+498 pp.
Retallack GJ 2018. RE: Dickinsonia steroids not unique to animals. Science 2018-10-03.
Seilacher A 1992. Vendobionta and Psammocorallia: lost constructions of Precambrian evolution. Journal of the Geological Society 149(4): 607–613. DOI: 10.1144/gsjgs.149.4.0607.

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