Re: Early Cambrian explosion

Steven H. Schimmrich (sschimmr@ursa.calvin.edu)
Fri, 05 Feb 1999 12:37:03 -0500

At 10:57 AM 2/5/99 -0800, Art Chadwick wrote:
>
>So why do you not embrace these new data? I was addressing the question to
>people whose beliefs I know, and the question is a good one that deserves
>consideration in the larger forum of the scientific community. The
>rhetoric you introduce is sidestepping the real issue: the data with
>respect to the origin of complex forms. The data are real, pervasive and
>conclusive, with respect to our present level of knowledge. Molecular
>biology confirms that the earliest metazoans were fully as complex as any
>modern forms. Where did the complexity come from? If one turns to the
>fossil record for the answer, the response is a hollow emptiness. No
>amount of sidestepping, rhetoric or shadowboxing is going to change that.
>Given that the issue is well known and there are a number of competent
>teams in the field trying to find data in the Precambrian for complex life
>forms, now pushed a billion years before the first metazoan fossil forms,
>it is time to introduce a positive alternative that makes sense: They were
>created. Not a popular theory to be sure, but to say that it came from
>nothing is tantamount to blind faith, something that nobody on this
>listserve would like to acknowledge as a necessity in science.

You seem to be arguing for a divine creative event at the base of the
Cambrian for metazoans. Now you know that metazoans appear in the late
Proterozoic as well (i.e. they don't all occur instantly in the geologic
record just, geologically-speaking, very quickly). How is this explained?
When do you date this creative event? Secondly, unicellular organisms are
themselves pretty complex on the cellular level and their record extends back
into the Archean. How many creative events are you postulating? One? Two?
A dozen? After a while, progressive creationism tends to start looking like
evolutionary speciation.

Let's assume that metazoans were miraculously created at the PC/C boundary.
How on Earth does one test that hypothesis? I would assume by trying to falsify
it by searching for earlier metazoan fossils. Isn't that what paleontologists
are doing (although, admittedly, not with those motives) since the development of
metazoan life is a hot research topic right now. And how do we know when we've
searched long and hard enough to conclude that maybe your idea is correct? The
problem with your hypothesis (and generally all "theistic science" type hypotheses)
is that they seem, at least to me, to be untestable.

- Steve.

--   Steven H. Schimmrich, Assistant Professor of Geology   Department of Geology, Geography, and Environmental Studies   Calvin College, 3201 Burton Street SE, Grand Rapids, Michigan 49546   sschimmr@calvin.edu (office), schimmri@earthlink.net (home)   616-957-7053 (voice mail), 616-957-6501 (fax)    http://home.earthlink.net/~schimmrich/