On Wed, 29 Nov 95 9:37:18 EST you wrote:
JT>Did anyone else get a chance to review the most recent issue of
>_Time_ magazine: "Evolution's Big Bang"? It's cover story is on the
>most recent discoveries related to the Cambrian explosion. The
>article is numbingly similar to a recent article on this subject
>in _National Geographic_, Vol. 184, No.4, Oct. 1993. They even
>ripped-off some of the same pictures! The article is more
>up-to-date and discusses some of the most recent discoveries like
>those reported in _Science_ "Biostratigraphic and Geochronological
>Constraints of Early Animal Evolution" Vol. 270, pp 598-604,
>Oct. 27, 1995. The more recent discoveries have continued to
>collapse the Cambrian era into an ever increasingly spectacular
>explosion. The current estimates for the time of the explosive
>phase of the Cambrian era is 5-20 million years.
Thanks for posting this. On the Australian fidonet Creation v
Evolution echo I have been taunted about the Ediacaran forms as a
"failed experiment". It now looks more like a single comples event.
JT>An excerpt from
>the National Geographic article (page 125) reads as follows:
>
>"So far the team has found five distinct animal communities, each from
>a different environment, that were buried at different times over several
>million years. Collins sees little evolutionary change among these
>animals, which indicates that by Burgess times the explosive phase of
>the Cambrian was spent. "New fossils found in China and Greenland look
>very much like the Burgess animals," says Collins. "Yet they are up
>to 15 million years older."
> Moreover, new radiometric dates indicate that the Cambrian had begun
>barely ten million years before the Chinese fossils lived. Therefore,
>the modern animal groups emerged almost at once - making the Cambrian
>explosion appear to be the big bang of zoology."
If Darwin had known this, I wonder if his theory would have even got
off the ground? It sort of falsifies the following:
"As natural selection acts solely by accumulating slight, successive,
favourable variations, it can produce no great or sudden
modifications; it can act only by short and slow steps. Hence the
canon of "Natura non facit saltum," which every fresh addition to our
knowledge tends to confirm, is on this theory intelligible." (Darwin
C., "The Origin of Species", Everyman's Library, J.M. Dent & Sons:
London, 1967, p447).
JT>The latest issue of _Time_ takes the report a step further and
almost
>flirts with disaster in the following:
>
>"The more scientists struggle to explain the Cambrian explosion, the
>more singular it seems. And just as the peculiar behavior of light
>forced physicists to conclude that Newton's laws were incomplete, so
>the Cambrian explosion has caused experts to wonder if the twin
>Darwinian imperatives of genetic variation and natural selection
>provide an adequate framework for understanding evolution. 'What
>Darwin described in the _Origin of Species_,' observes Queen's
>University paleontologist Narbonne, 'was the steady background kind
>of evolution. But there also seems to be a non-Darwinian kind of
>evolution that functions over extremely short time periods - and
>that's where all the action is." (page 74)
Yes. I like the following:
"Now, with information based on the lead content of zircons from
Siberia, virtually everyone agrees that the Cambrian started almost
exactly 543 million years ago and, even more startling, that all but
one of the phyla in the fossil record appeared within the first 5
million to 10 million years. `We now know how fast fast is,' grins
`And what I like to ask my biologist friends is, How fast can
evolution get before they start feeling uncomfortable?' (Nash J.M.,
"When Life Exploded", Time, December 4, 1995, p74)
JT>The writers of this article once again called in the
trouble-shooting
>team from 'Complexity Analysts, Inc.' Citing Stuart Kauffman who
>spins his order-from-chaos and self-organization stories to explain
>this difficult phenomena. This is the same guy _Time_ called
>"suspiciously trendy" and "new age" and "at best inchoate but fruitful
>and, at worst inchoate and sterile" in their Dec. 28, 1992 article on
>spontaneous origin-of-life theories. Stuart Kauffman didn't get
>dis'ed in this article. Perhaps it finally dawned on the writing
>staff of _Time_ that if new complexity theories fail, they may be
>left without a theory.
Interesting. As Johnson says, about Stuart Kauffman's self-organizing
theories:
"If the rulers of science really mean to jump into this lifeboat, I
will be happy to participate in the ensuing discussion, but I think
that after assessing the prospects they will elect to stay on the
sinking ship and keep trying to plug the holes." (Johnson P.E.,
"Darwin on Trial", InterVarsity Press: Downers Grove IL, Second
Edition, 1993, p213).
JT>The Cambrian explosion falsifies an earlier prediction of
>evolutionary theory: diversity should precede disparity. This
>is artistically represented in Ernst Haeckel's "Tree of Life."
>It is a necessary prediction from the classical (gradualistic)
>theory of evolution. But the dominant pattern throughout the
>fossil record - and especially in the Cambrian fossils - is that
>disparity precedes diversity. Stephen Jay Gould makes this point
>in his book _Wonderful Life_ as he notes that we have been viewing
>the cone of life backwards.
Indeed, it fits better a creation model than an evolutionary one,
as Wise points out:
"...in the tree analogy, the number of major branches increases
through time. The branches arise due to the proliferation of twigs so
the number of twigs increases faster than numbers of branches. In the
fossil record, however, such a "cone of increasing diversity" is not
observed. Instead, the number of major groups we have today was
achieved early in earth history, when species diversity was low. In
fact, the number of classes of arthropods and echinoderms at the time
of the first appearance of each of these groups was actually higher
than it is at present. This would argue-as do the distribution of
species, higher group stasis and the paucity of intermediates-that
major groups do not arise due to a proliferation of species. Yet no
evolutionary mechanism for how this transformation did occur has yet
been found." (Wise K.P., "The Origin of Life's Major Groups", in
Moreland J.P. ed., "The Creation Hypothesis",InterVarsity Press:
Downers Grove IL, 1994, , p220).
But no doubt the ingenuity of evolutionists will rise to the occasion
and accommodate even this data "like fog accommodates landscape" as
Walter ReMine puts it!
God bless.
Stephen
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