Re: Early Cambrian explosion

Arthur V. Chadwick (chadwicka@swau.edu)
Mon, 08 Feb 1999 08:28:20 -0800

At 12:37 PM 2/5/99 -0500, Steve wrote:
>At 10:57 AM 2/5/99 -0800, Art Chadwick wrote:

> 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.

Naw, I will settle for some disputes as to exactly when the Cambrian began
in various places, especially when the boundary is conformable or
paraconformable, and argue for a single creation event for metazoa. I will
leave the question of the Precambrian life forms open for the time being.
>
> 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.

It is good science for precisely this reason to hold their feet to the
fire. Pushing the uncertainty this issue produces into the forefront of
the scientific community will have precisely the effect of making better
science and giving us more certainty in our answers. That is all I want
from pushing the issue.
Art
http://geology.swau.edu