The Cambrian “Explosion”
“The new fossils appear in an interval of 20 million years or less. On evolutionary time scales, 20 million years is a rapid burst that appears to be inconsistent with the gradual pace of evolutionary change.”
The Cambrian Explosion sounds quite dramatic and exciting, doesn’t it? If it had been called the Cambrian Migration, I don’t think it would have resounded so interestingly.
But let us consider; it is commonly accepted that the Chicxulub meteor impact doomed the age of the dinosaurs, and that all mammals and birds with which we are familiar date from that beginning. That was sixty-five million years ago, so our “explosion” of cats and rats and elephants has occurred at a relatively slow speed compared to the race of Cambrian animals that preceded all of us.
I find that there are two phenomena which cause tremendous confusion in discussions of the fossil record. One is coincidence, which seems to garner a rolling of the eyes when it is invoked. Coincidence controls when fossils may be created. Coincidentally, it is a fickle master.
The other is the sheer scope and breadth of time that is involved. We speak of twenty million years as if it were something that might go by in the blink of an eye. Well, not our eyes. Perhaps God’s eyes, but not ours. Twenty million seconds takes almost a month, and twenty million minutes is a great deal more than “a coon’s age”.
Twenty million days ... oh, my! I only want a million days.
And so on, through weeks, months, and finally years. The tortoises of Galapagos could have walked around the Earth dozens of times to get to their destination, and to escape that “explosion”.
The Cambrian separated relatively simple animals from a wide panoply of crawling, hopping, slithering and bumbling critters who managed to find not only interesting ways to get about, but also multifarious ways to die in interesting and memorable circumstances. If you want to be a fossil, it helps to have bones.
Have I read Meyer’s books? No. But I dare say, he hasn’t read mine, either. Would you have read his books if he had suggested that Darwin was correct about evolution, and that neither of them had any idea about how this all got started?
“I find that there are two phenomena which cause tremendous confusion in discussions of the fossil record. One is coincidence, which seems to garner a rolling of the eyes when it is invoked. Coincidence controls when fossils may be created. Coincidentally, it is a fickle master.
The other is the sheer scope and breadth of time that is involved. We speak of twenty million years as if it were something that might go by in the blink of an eye. Well, not our eyes. Perhaps God’s eyes, but not ours. Twenty million seconds takes almost a month, and twenty million minutes is a great deal more than “a coon’s age”.”
Meyer addresses all of that and much more in a very detailed, meticulous, methodical and intellectually honest way.
Check it out, you may be pleasantly surprised.
“Have I read Meyer’s books? No. But I dare say, he hasn’t read mine, either. Would you have read his books if he had suggested that Darwin was correct about evolution, and that neither of them had any idea about how this all got started?”
Of course I’ve read books on evolution (which did you write?) - as I said in my earlier post I was a “believer”, but after reading Meyer’s book, I’m a strong skeptic.