what exactly do you mean by "fully developed"? They were complete animals.
Incomplete animals usually don't survive beyond the zygote stage.
>The
>rapid origin of the basic body plans is a mystery, why not enjoy it? Why
>assume it happened gradually, when the evidence does not support this?
Are we to assume that things "were different back then"? What compelling
reason do we have to assume that?
>Since that creative period, zero new basic body plans have evolved.
That's not exactly true. Perhaps you overlooked this:
"Our own phylum (which we share with other mammals, reptiles,
birds, amphibians and fish) was represented by a small, sliver-like thing
called Pikaia. Plants were not yet present. Photosynthetic protists and algae
were the bottom of the food chain."
Aren't plants a new "body plan"? Rather radically different from algae.
Also I think in the last 500,000,000 years we have come a long way since
the "small sliver-like things" that represented our phylum in the Cambrian.
Yes we are still vertebrate tetrapods, but saying (or implying) "and
nothing new has happened since then" is astonishingly inaccurate--at best.
Especially since that sliver-like thing is the ancestor of frogs,
elephants, dogs, ostriches and ourselves.
>This implies that a qualititatively different kind of evolution triggered the
>Cambrian explosion.
There were a lot of open niches in the pre-Cambrian that are now filled.
There have been other "explosions" after the Cambrian and die-offs also. I
really don't see why the Cambrian is supposed to be so special.
>>The UCSB website is creationist propaganda.
>
>As I was the first to point out, but so what? The topic was 'Cambrian
>Explosion, yes or not really?', a scientific question.
It was an explosion, but it took 65,000,000 years to "explode." You said
the site seemed "creationistic" but you said that "the quotes are good."
I'd like to know why you said that.
Susan
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"Life itself is the proper binge."
--Julia Child
http://www.telepath.com/susanb/