Tag Archives: Cambrian Explosion

Podcasts

Stephen C. Meyer discusses his book “Darwin’s Doubt” on the Michael Medved show

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The new paperback edition of Darwin’s Doubt is now out (June 2014), and has a new epilogue responding to criticisms of the hardcover first edition. If you don’t have the book, now’s the time to grab it.

Here is a radio interview that Dr. Meyer did about the book, courtesy of the Intelligent Design: The Future podcast.

The MP3 file is available for download. (38 minutes)

The description is:

On this episode of ID the Future, the Michael Medved Show welcomes Dr. Stephen Meyer to talk about his new bestselling book, Darwin’s Doubt: The Explosive Origin of Animal Life and the Case for Intelligent Design. Listen in as Meyer and Medved discuss the mysteries of the Cambrian explosion and why this phenomenon continues to stump Darwinian evolutionists.

Each week, leading fellows from Discovery Institute will join Michael Medved to talk about the intersection of science and culture. Listen in live online or on your local Medved station, or stay tuned at ID the Future for the weekly podcast.

Topics:

  • Darwinism offers a materialistic account of where humans and animals came from, but is that all human beings are?
  • Darwin was the first to have doubt about his theory of evolution because of the sudden origin if many different animal forms in the Cambrian era
  • The book is about the sudden origin of these animal forms and more generally about how much information is needed to make an animal genome
  • An animal is not just the form or the organs it is also the information to make new proteins and the instructions to make proteins are in the DNA
  • At least 20 new phyla appear suddenly in the Cambrian fossils and the question is what is capable of creating all of that new information
  • Mathematicians and computer scientists are especially likely to doubt evolution as a way of making new features because they know that random changes to the code base of an application are more likely to break things and degrade performance
  • Naturalists have tried to explain the Cambrian explosion as being a case of the transitional fossils being not yet discovered
  • The consensus of science at this time is that there is no known naturalistic explanation for the sudden origin of these animal types
  • Caller: how abrupt are we talking about for the introduction of these new animal forms?
  • Meyer: We can calculate the amount of time that is needed to generate change, and the period of time that is needed to generate new forms of life exceeds the time available
  • Caller: is it possible that meteors, asteroids and comets could transport biological components to the Earth to shorten the development time?
  • Meyer: that’s related to my first book on the origin of the first living cell “Signature in the Cell”, and that life-from-space hypothesis would only get you building blocks, but not the bio-molecules that have the building blocks sequences – it’s the difference between a pile of Scrabble letters and a Shakespearean play – it’s the arranging of the components that is the problem
  • Medved: The book has a lot of endorsements from scientists who are working at good universities and institutions
  • Meyer: the strange thing about exploring the limits of evolution is that you can cite mainstream papers to criticize the Darwinian mechanisms, and then the proponents of Darwinism just assert that no criticism of Darwinian evolution is allowed
  • Caller Greg: are you saying that all the phyla came in during the Cambrian explosion?
  • Meyer: No, of the 26 phyla that we see in the fossil record, 20 come in during the Cambrian explosion
  • Caller Greg: But there are some sponges that existed before the Cambrian explosion, so maybe all the Cambrian phyla came from sponges?
  • Meyer: There are 3 phyla present in the pre-Cambrian but they are not ancestral to the 20 Cambrian phyla, the sponges are very simple – 6-10 cell types, arthropods have 60-90 cell types – you can’t go from sponges to compound eyes in just 5-10 million years
  • Meyer: even the sponges in the pre-Cambrian appear abrutly at the end of the pre-Cambrian
  • Caller Greg: but there are complex worms in the Pre-Cambrian as well, and maybe those are ancestral to the 20 new phyla that appear suddenly in the Cambrian explosion
  • Caller Greg: what you’re saying is that we scientists don’t understand what happened so an intelligence did it
  • Meyer: No, what I am saying is that the Cambrian explosion involves massive amounts of new biological information, and none of the naturalistic Darwinian mechanisms can create that much new information in that short of the time
  • Caller Greg: it’s magic!
  • Meyer: there are two points in the development of life forms where intelligence is needed: the origin of life and the Cambrian explosion, and this is because of the new information that is being added
  • Caller Greg: new information is added by Hox Gene duplication
  • Caller: don’t we have to look a bit more at epistemology when discussing these issues?
  • Meyer: Yes, we have to highlight that many people reject intelligent design because of a pre-supposition of naturalism that prevents them from seeing that intelligence explains anything regardless of the evidence
  • Caller: well if you define evolution as change over time, then evolution happened, and who cares about the details like the origin of life and Cambrian explosion?
  • Meyer: well there are many definitions of evolution: 1) change over time, 2) universal common ancestry, 3) undirected random process can explain the origin of life and the explosion of new animal forms in the fossil record
  • Meyer: I accept 1) and I am skeptical of 2) and 3)

You can read more about caller Greg and Hox gene duplication at Evolution News.

News

New study: ancient Cambrian-era fossils have similar brains to animals today

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Cambrian Explosion
Cambrian Explosion

Dr. Fazale Rana of Reasons to Believe tweeted this – from the prestigious journal Nature!

Excerpt:

One could be forgiven for mistaking anomalocaridids for creatures from another world. The spade-shaped predators, which lived in the seas during the Cambrian — the geological era stretching from 541 million to 485 million years ago — had eyes that protruded from stalks and a pair of giant appendages on the sides of their mouths. But three stunningly well-preserved fossils found in China now show that the anomalocaridid brain was wired much like that of modern creatures called velvet worms, or onychophorans.

Both anomalocaridids and onychophorans belong to the arthropods, the group of invertebrates that includes spiders and insects and whose brain structures come in three main types. Two of those were already known to be very ancient, and the new fossils, described today in Nature, suggest that the third type — the neural architecture found in onychophorans — also has changed little over more than half a billion years of evolution.

Named Lyrarapax unguispinus, the three fossils reveal creatures that — at 8 centimetres long — are on the small side for anomalocaridids, some of which are thought to have been as long as 2 to 3 metres. But the fossils’ segmented bodies and frontal appendages are pure anomalocaridid, says Nicholas Strausfeld, a neuroscientist at the University of Arizona in Tucson, who co-led the study.

What really grabbed Strausfeld’s attention was the creature’s brain, preserved flattened like a pressed flower: “I said, ‘Holy s**t, that’s an onychophoran brain!’” he recalls. The animal’s frontal appendages are connected to nerve bundles, or ganglia, in front of optic nerves. Both the ganglia and the optic nerves lead to a segmented brain. The layout is an uncanny match to the wiring of the velvet worm’s brain, Strausfeld says: “It’s completely unlike anything else in any other arthropod.”

The fossil record is pretty simple at a high-level. Single-celled organisms from the cooling of the Earth to the Cambrian explosion. All the phyla come in 5-10 million years in the Cambrian explosion – maybe less. No new phyla emerge after that. Does that look like naturalistic Darwinian evolution to you?

News

New study: apoptosis is unchanged from Cambrian fossils to modern humans

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Darwinian theory predicts that animals and animal subsystems all start of very small, and they get more and more complex as time passes, due to mutation and selection. That’s the theory. But is it true?

Here’s a striking article from Evolution News about a new PNAS peer-reviewed publication.

Excerpt:

Science progresses when investigators boldly question assumptions. Look at the assumption that a group of scientists questioned: Darwinian evolution. Eight scientists from San Diego State University, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, and Cedars-Sinai Heart Institute published a bombshell in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences:

The Precambrian explosion [they mean the Cambrian explosion] led to the rapid appearance of most major animal phyla alive today. It has been argued that the complexity of life has steadily increased since that event. Here we challenge this hypothesis through the characterization of apoptosis in reef-building corals, representatives of some of the earliest animals. Bioinformatic analysis reveals that all of the major components of the death receptor pathway are present in coral with high-predicted structural conservation with Homo sapiens. (Emphasis added.)

Apoptosis is “programmed cell death.” When a cell becomes unstable or diseased, genetic algorithms kill it in an orderly way, to prevent further harm to the organism. Specialized enzymes (especially the TNF superfamilies) switch on the program, setting locked-up destroyers called caspases loose in the cell.

[…]Corals have many of the same TNF enzymes that humans do. This got the team wondering:

The TNF receptor-ligand superfamilies (TNFRSF/TNFSF) are central mediators of the death receptor pathway, and the predicted proteome of Acropora digitifera contains more putative coral TNFRSF members than any organism described thus far, including humans. This high abundance of TNFRSF members, as well as the predicted structural conservation of other death receptor signaling proteins, led us to wonder what would happen if corals were exposed to a member of the human TNFSF (HuTNFα).

In a series of experiments, they inserted coral enzymes into human cells. The human cells died. Then they ran the reciprocal experiment, putting human TNF enzymes into coral, and its cells died too. Even the bleaching process was seen using human enzymes. The agents of death were perfectly interchangeable, despite 550 million years for evolution to have increased the complexity of the system.

[…]This is evidence against Darwinian evolution on both sides of the coin: it shows no evolutionary “progress” despite all that time, and it shows a complex system appearing abruptly right at the beginning of complex animal origins.

So you get the complexity right at the beginning, and it doesn’t change in 550 million years. It doesn’t fit with the Darwinian predictions.