“As expected, you appear to be conflating the origin of life with the origin of species.”
Actually I’m not. There are two things that biologists have no explanations for. The origin of life and big changes (morphological, systemic) in life.
Darwin himself had no explanation for the origin of life and thus he did not claim that his evolution theory explained how life began. I and Meyer understand that. Darwin ASSUMED the existence of life but claimed that his theory explained subsequent changes and developments.
But Darwin himself had some doubts about his theory because of the Cambrian Explosion and the lack of any previous fossil records that would have led to it. He thought that in due time new fossil discoveries would prove him right. Well as of today such has not been the case. And as I mentioned in my post, Meyer is not the only one who has serious doubts. Many other biologists have come out with various modification to the theory (including Gould, and others), all have proven inadequate.
I understand that the origin of life problem is not related to Darwinian evolution. A different type of evolution for the origin of life is suggested by materialists - one that relies on serendipity (the primordial soup with all the appropriate elements, energy, and chemical forces), and subsequently a Darwinian type of evolution of “survival of the fittest” resulting products of this soup. This was Alexander Oparin’s theory. (See Ch 2 of “Signature in the Cell”). Meyer blows out of the water both Darwin and Oparin.
Have you read Meyer’s books?
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?