So, just to refresh everyone, the Cambrian explosion was an event that occurred about 543 million years ago. In a very short period of time, less than 10 million years, probably 3-5 million, all of the major animal body plans emerged.
Here’s what the Cambrian explosion looks like:
The Darwinian theory says that there should be precursors to all of the new phyla that appear. But we have never been able to find any precursors. We’ve been looking in the fossil record for the slow transition from simple life to complex life that Darwin predicted, but we’ve never been able to find anything that explains the sudden emergence of the body plans in the Cambrian explosion.
There is no known naturalistic explanation for the rapid emergence of these “phyla”. But, naturalists were holding out hope that maybe a sudden rise in the level of oxygen might have “triggered” the required increase in complexity.
This is from Science Daily.
Excerpt:
Oxygen is crucial for the existence of animals on Earth. But, an increase in oxygen did not apparently lead to the rise of the first animals. New research shows that 1.4 billion years ago there was enough oxygen for animals — and yet over 800 million years went by before the first animals appeared on Earth.
Animals evolved by about 600 million years ago, which was late in Earth’s history. The late evolution of animals, and the fact that oxygen is central for animal respiration, has led to the widely promoted idea that animal evolution corresponded with a late a rise in atmospheric oxygen concentrations.
“But sufficient oxygen in itself does not seem to be enough for animals to rise. This is indicated by our studies,” say postdoc Emma Hammarlund and Professor Don Canfield, Nordic Center for Earth Evolution, University of Southern Denmark.
[…]The new study is published in the journal Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences.
[…]The results differ from other studies and raise several questions, such as: Why then did animals rise so late in Earth’s history?
“The sudden diversification of animals probably was a result of many factors. Maybe the oxygen rise had less to do with the animal revolution than we previously assumed,” says Hammarlund.
Now look here. I don’t see how a rise in oxygen level can create new body plans. Body plans are written in sequences of symbols – in proteins and DNA. I can no more believe that a rise in oxygen levels could create new animal body plans than I could believe that raising the level of oxygen in a computer lab could explain the new code that is being written by the software engineers. Body plans are information, and new body plans require new information. Information comes from software engineers – intelligent agents – not from rising oxygen levels.
In any case, the hypothesis was falsified. It isn’t the first time a naturalistic hypothesis for the Cambrian explosion was shot down (see below) and it won’t be the last.
Related posts
- New study: fossil discovery adds a new phyla to the explosive Cambrian explosion
- Stephen C. Meyer and Marcus Ross lecture on the Cambrian explosion
- How brief was the period in which the Cambrian phyla suddenly appeared?
- New study: ancient Cambrian-era fossils have similar brains to animals today
- New study: apoptosis is unchanged from Cambrian fossils to modern humans
- Fazale Rana responds to new paper claiming that rapid evolution explains Cambrian explosion
- New paper in Nature: Ediacaran fossils not ancestors of Cambrian fauna
- Nature publishes discovery of fossil with complex brain dated just after the Cambrian explosion
- Bad news for believers in naturalistic explanations of the Cambrian explosion
- Paul Chien interviewed on the Cambrian era fossils
- What is the best explanation for the Cambrian fossil record?
- The Cambrian explosion: biology’s Big Bang
- The Cambrian explosion is getting more explosive
WINTERY KNIGHT 
This is a tremendous find that I don’t thinks been discussed in the I.D/Creation/Evolution circles yet. I’m saving this. God bless
LikeLike