A story on the Cambrian explosion from the radically pro-evolution BBC. (H/T Evolution News)
Excerpt:
In a new study, Canadian researchers identified a previously unclassifiable fossil that was long believed to belong perhaps to the shrimp family.
They called it Nectocaris pteryx – a small soft-bodied cephalopod with two tentacles rather than the eight or 10 seen in today’s octopuses.
The new survey’s results were presented in the journal Nature.
The findings make the ancestors of modern squid and octopuses at least 30 million years older.
Evolutionary biologist Martin Smith, the main author of the study, told PA news agency that the findings bring cephalopods much closer to the first appearance of complex animals.
“We go from very simple pre-Cambrian life-forms to something as complex as a cephalopod in the geological blink of an eye, which illustrates just how quickly evolution can produce complexity,” said Mr Smith.
Yes, isn’t it amazing how naturalistic mechanisms like “evolution” can create brand new complex body plans out of nothing, in the blink of an eye? And isn’t it amazing that this evidence doesn’t falsify naturalism at all! Oh, no no no no no no, it doesn’t – because naturalism is a blind faith commitment. Evidence is irrelevant to a blind faith commitment. The entire physical universe can pop into being out of nothing, but naturalism is still true – because they want it to be true. All praise the Flying Spaghetti Monster!
The more body plans that appear suddenly, the less plausible evolution becomes. You can’t have a massive infusion of biological information appearing out of nowhere without an intelligent agent to sequence the individual characters. New software requires a software engineer.
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WINTERY KNIGHT 
Do you have some evidence that disputes the current understanding of the Cambrian Explosion? You do know that a geological “blink of an eye” is still millions upon millions of years right? The Cambrian, specifically took about 55 million years if I remember correctly.
If you’ve got a counter-argumnet, by all means, present it.
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The phyla come in over a period of 3-5 million years. The fossil record is supposed to show a branching tree of life, starting with one or two phyla and gradually branching out into different body plans. What you see in the fossile record is 3.5 billion years of single-cell organisms, then all the phyla come in. No new phyla since the Cambrian explosion. They all came in suddenly with no precursors in the fossil record.
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It’s much more than 3-5 million years. The Cambrian spanned a period roughly equal to the time since the the extinction of the dinosaurs until now. It wasn’t some crazy evolutionary weekend.
The progression of evolution throughout the Cambrian is very much intact, showing the expected branching, and the expected transitions. It just happened more rapidly at the time, and there are many things that could have caused that. Much more oxygen was in the air, which speeds up mutations. The amount of information in the genome of animals may also have reached a critical point where more mutations ended up to be beneficial. There are lots of good theories, but we don’t need to know why it happened to look at the evidence and determine that it did, in fact, happen.
None of the new creatures had body parts that evolved out of nothing. Each and every new body part is just a new or more advanced use of a body part that existed in an ancestor. The eye is a perfect example, is well documented, and exists in all ancestral stages in current creatures that can be observed.
We know that these animals existed – you don’t seem to deny that – and we know which ones came first due to the fossil record and the genetic analysis of modern day animals, which match perfectly, so one cannot deny that the Cambrian Explosion was a bona-fide event. So what is your argument? That it did not actually happen, or that this was the creation event performed by God?
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The phyla don’t come in over the whole Cambrian era, just from 543 mya to 540 mya, or maybe 538 mya at the latest. It’s some crazy evolutionary weekend. Here’s a Time magazine article that says 5-10 million, but that article is old. It’s 2-3, 5 max.
There are no transitionals. It’s bacteria to fully-formed body plans in a couple million years. No progression. They just appear. POW. And I am talking from the Chengjiang valley in China to the Burgess Shale in Canada. POW. You’ve got 40 different kinds of body plans where there were single celled organisms one minute before. It’s like going to a software store and putting console games in the empty shopping cart and checking out. Where did the software come from?
The argument is that software requires a software engineer.
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Extraordinary isn’t it? But the evidence is there. By the way, what makes you trust the opinions of the scientists when they say the phyla developed in about 5 million years, but you think they are out to lunch when they say that there are plenty of transitional fossils? How is it that you use evolutionary evidence as evidence against evolution.
You went from 10 million, to 5 million, to 2-3 million, to “one minute”. It was likely several million years, and there evidence that certain complex creatures actually existed pre-cambrian. Think about how long 3 million years actually is. Some of these creatures at the beginning had life cycles that lasted a fraction of a day. That’s hundreds of millions of generations of creatures. Humans have only had around 10,000 generations.
As far as the geological distances, there was just one continent, so that’s kind of moot.
On the issue of no transitionals – that’s both incorrect, and irrelevant. The creatures that evolved in the cambrian were the first that COULD be fossilized, as earlier creatures were only soft tissue. The transitionals, however are documented both by alternate fossil evidence such as trace fossils and borings, and the modern day genetic analysis.
You’ve obviously done some research on this, but how do you pass by so much scientific opinion that finds this evidence to be completely consistent with the theory of evolution? So scientific papers have been written that say the cambrian explosion disproves evolution. All it takes to disprove evolution (and if it’s not true – this should be dead easy) is to find one fossil in a layer that is geologically dated to be out of sequence according to evolutionary theory. Find one, and the whole thing is out the window. We’ve found millions of fossils, and each one has been where it should be – often exactly where we predicted. That’s how we found the descendants of the whale. We knew there needed to be transitional creatures, and we knew where they should be. We dug in those layers, and there they were. How do you explain that any other way?
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Some atheists admit they are, in their minds, safeguarding evolution against creationists— so they purposely downplay anything that challenges Natural Selection. Now, I think there is more than enough evidence to show the earth is billions of years old and least some form of evolution had taken place, so is it really the creationists that worry them?.
It can’t be because creationism is there favorite strawman…knowing how easy it is to knock down they attack it because Intelligent Design is Formidable to say the least.
So the bottom line is Fear. There is so much riding on this for them. First, their smug arrogance had caused them to belittle even their own colleges who question whether we truly know as much as we think we do. Second, they have mocked God himself and those who live Him. Being wrong there is not like missing the ice cream truck. —is the biggest mistake a human can make. All this adss up to a pathological bias that is virtually indestructible—as denial is the path of last resistance
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