The Cambrian explosion is the name given to the sudden origin of basically all of the major body plans in nature. It happened in a 3-5 million year period about 540 million years ago. It’s a problem for naturalists, because of the enormous amount of information needed to make these new (and different) body plans. The best explanation they had was that rising oxygen levels did it. Is that right?

Here’s an excellent post by Günter Bechly, writing for Evolution News.

Here’s the naturalistic scenario:

For more than seventy years it was the scientific consensus and undisputed textbook wisdom that the origin of multicellular life in the late Precambrian was triggered by increased oxygen levels (Fike et al. 2006, Sahoo et al. 2012, Lyons et al. 2014, Reinhard et al. 2016, Anonymous 2023, Harrison 2023, Ralls 2023, UCPH 2023). For example, McFadden et al. (2008) identified two pulses of oxidation in the Precambrian and found that “following this second oxidation event, between 550 and 542 million years ago, there was a worldwide increase of Ediacaran organisms, complex macroscopic life forms, an event recently dubbed the Avalon Explosion” (Virginia Tech 2008). Similarily, the study by Pogge von Strandmann et al. (2015) was promoted in a press release as demonstrating that “oxygen provided breath of life that allowed animals to evolve” (Hickey et al. 2015).

This was all a lot of theorizing in order to save naturalism from scientific evidence. But science makes progress, and the smoke gets cleared:

Now a new study (Ostrander et al. 2023) by group of researchers from Denmark has overturned decades of evolutionary dogma and claims the exact opposite: “oxygen didn’t trigger multicellular organisms” (Anonymous 2023, UCPH 2023). What this study found was instead clear evidence of a lower oxygen content correlated with the Avalon Explosion of the Ediacaran biota. The authors summarize their surprising findings as: “Contrary to a classical hypothesis, our interpretations place the Shuram excursion, and any coeval animal evolutionary events, in a predominantly anoxic global ocean.” Co-author Christian Bjerrum commented “Specifically, it means that we need to rethink a lot of the things that we believed to be true from our childhood learning. And textbooks need to be revised and rewritten. So, if not extra oxygen, what triggered the era’s explosion of life? Perhaps the exact opposite” (Anonymous 2023, UCPH 2023). Some even went further and suggested to “forget everything you thought you knew about how life evolved on Earth” (Ralls 2023) because it “turns out we might be very wrong about how life arose on Earth” (Harrison 2023).

Prior to the “increase in oxygen” hypothesis, naturalists used to explain away the Cambrian explosion by saying that we had not studied the fossil record for long enough. “Eventually, we will have a better picture of the fossil record, and that will show that we started with a few simple life forms, and then branched out into more and more complex life forms, over an hundreds of millions of years”.

But that’s not what they are saying now, because the evidence is in:

Here is what Professor Derek Briggs, a world-renowned expert on Cambrian fossils, has to say on this issue: “We now know that the sudden appearance of fossils in the Cambrian (541–485 million years ago) is real and not an artefact of an imperfect fossil record” (Briggs 2015). Likewise, Zhang & Shu (2021) admitted that “multiple sources of evidence are strongly suggestive of a real evolutionary event being recorded rather than an artifact of an imperfect fossil record.” Cabej (2020) put it even more clearly: “Nevertheless, now, 150 years after The Origin, when an incomparably larger stock of animal fossils has been collected, Darwin’s gap remains, the abrupt appearance of Cambrian fossils is a reality, and we are still wondering about the forces and mechanisms that drove it.

How many times does this have to happen, before naturalists admit that they are committing the “atheism-of-the-gaps” fallacy?

Before science, atheists told us that the universe was eternal. Then science progressed, and we now know that the universe – space, time, matter and energy – all came into being out of nothing about 14 billion years ago. What could cause that? Well, the cause of all of nature must be supernatural. 

Before science, atheists told us that any old universe would support life. If gravity was a little different, then people would just have pointy ears, like you see on Star Trek. But then science progressed, and we now have a long list of dozens of constants and quantities in nature that must be finely-tuned to an incredibly high degree in order for complex life of any kind to exist. Fine-tuning requires an intelligent agent – that’s the only explanation that we have experience with.

Before science, atheists told us that the origin of life was easy. Life is just a clump of jello, very boring and simple. No need for a cosmic engineer. But then science progressed, and we discovered biological information, such as DNA, inside the cell. Naturalists tried to say that most (or all) of that information was “junk DNA”, but more science happened proving them wrong again.

I could go on and on with example after example. Naturalism is about faith. They start with the desire for personal autonomy. Autonomy from the moral law. They speculate about how nature can be explained without a Creator and Designer. They take refuge in gaps in our scientific understanding. But then science progresses, the gaps close, and everyone knows for certain.

Regular readers of this blog will know that I encourage young people to do STEM degrees or high-paying trades in order to avoid running up student loans. Many Americans don’t listen to me – they follow their hearts. They do useless degrees in English, Psychology, Music, etc. and then they can’t find work. But that doesn’t stop them from stealing the money of people who made better decisions.

Far-left Business Insider reports:

Joel Lambdin finished graduate school in 1998 — but as a professional musician, he was hardly making enough money to pay off his student loans and other bills.

So Lambdin, now 49, said his only option to make ends meet was to put his student loans in forbearance — in which he was not making payments but interest was still accumulating.

Then Joe Biden used taxpayer money – much of that from children who haven’t even started to work – to pay off this violinist’s loans:

That account adjustment led to a letter Lambdin received on January 31, reviewed by BI, from his student-loan servicer Aidvantage. It said: “Congratulations! The Biden-Harris Administration has forgiven your federal student loan(s) listed below with Aidvantage in full.”

For Lambdin, that letter meant his $249,255 outstanding student-loan balance was effectively wiped out.

[…]Beyond financial goals, Lambdin said the relief was also allowing him the freedom to pursue some of his long-term dreams, including taking a sabbatical to study with his meditation teacher in India.

Yes! This man who made so many wonderful decisions can now decide to stop working and go study meditation in India. And your children get to pay him to do that.