By AGNOSTICALIEN
Added: Sat, 15 May 2010 18:21:44 UTC

Recently, in response to a creationist who claimed there were no explanations from evolutionists for the Cambrian explosion, I posted an excerpt from a paleobiology website to counter the claim. After I posted it, this other anti-evolutionist who thinks he knows it all came back with his standard rebuttal. I was just wondering how some of you would respond to his remarks? Thanks for any contribution you can make.

First, here’s the excerpt from the paleobiology website. I’ve divided the excerpt into the two parts he attempted to refute.

"The Cambrian Explosion is the outcome of changes in environmental factors leading to changes in selective pressures in turn leading to adaptive diversification on a vast scale. By the start of the Cambrian, the large supercontinent Gondwana, comprising all land on Earth, was breaking up into smaller land masses. This increased the area of continental shelf, produced shallow seas, and expanded diversity of environmental niches in which animals could specialize and speciate.

The debate persists today about whether the evolutionary "explosion" of the Cambrian was as sudden and spontaneous as it appears in the fossil record. The discovery of new pre-Cambrian and Cambrian fossils help, as these transitional forms support the hypothesis that diversification was well underway before the Cambrian began. More recently, the sequencing of the genomes of thousands of life forms is revealing just how many and what genes and the proteins they encode have been conserved from the Precambrian. The explosion of external form in the fossil record is what we see, but more gradual adaptation was taking place at the molecular level. Wang et. al. (1999) for example, recently conducted phylogenetic studies divergences among animal phyla, plants, animals and fungi. These researchers estimated Arthropods diverged from more primitive chordates more than 900 million years ago, and Nematodes from that lineage almost 1200 million years ago. They furthermore estimated that the plant, animal and fungi Kingdoms might have split almost 1600 million years ago. Finally, they conjecture that the basal animal phyla (Porifera, Cnidaria, Ctenophora) diverged between about 1200 and 1500 million years ago. If their research is valid, at least six major metazoan phyla appeared deep in the Precambrian, hundreds of millions of years before the oldest fossils in the fossil record."

http://www.fossilmuseum.net/Paleobiolog ... losion.htm 

Here's his first response (to the second paragraph excerpt):

"This is a fascinating paragraph to post. It opens by telling us the issue isn’t even settled yet among Evolutionists, then tells us how they are sequencing thousands of genomes... the problem here is those genomes are of modern creatures!! – there are NO genomes of creatures from way back when. None! We have some from pre-holocene that are partials, & we have a few leaves from several million years back, but fossils do NOT provide genomes.

In other words, as the rest of the paragraph makes very clear, they are ‘estimating, what ‘might’ have happened’ conjecturing that a divergence may have happened and even question whether or not their guesses are valid.

This is less valid than the bible (& you should know my opinion of that as a reference) because at least there we have copies of copies of original source. These guesses based on modern phyla & species’ genetics not only is based on assumptions wide enough to bridge the Atlantic about how genes are passed along, they have only partial bits of stone fossils to work with.”

Then he goes on with his rebuttal to the first paragraph:

"Two issues arise here – the supercontinent is hypothesis only, it relies on a sudden start to tectonics & an ongoing process for which the evidence is only speculative. The height of the continents, or rather the depths of crust under them, compared to the depths under the oceans, causes a blink of the eyes when you try to propose subduction, & without subduction, continental drift doesn’t happen.

Another problem is the Evolutionary process – according to the main hypothesis, there can not be a build up of change – the mutations happen regularly, a tick they use to time the existence of the species emergence. We are assured this tick is constant – which you can understand because otherwise we’d all laugh at them for putting dates to anything.

So... how does a steady tick of change manage to suddenly, out of the blue, provide such incredible diversity as we see, again and again, after ELE’s?

Next you have the problem of how a change of environment can actually alter the genome at all. According to standard genetic theory, the changes are random, not directed, so any given alteration to biosphere has to await a change that can respond beneficially to the alteration, yet the sheer speed & number of changes after the major devastations of an ELE require very specific changes in very short time.

That implies the tick speeds up, to say the least. But if the tick can change then the dating is wrong. It means the ‘experts’ are simply placing dates according to their personal beliefs about how they should be, not letting the science speak for itself.

It’s a Catch 22 – either the constant tick is wrong, in which case their case falls apart as far as timing and sequence go, or the random nature of it all is wrong, in which case their hypothesis falls & opens the door to new ideas."

TAGGED: EVOLUTION