Organic fibers from fossilized Sabellidites tube worm casings
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Posted on 01/06/2021 9:32:50 PM PST by lasereye
The modern theory of evolution has its roots in Charles Darwin’s 1859 book On the Origin of Species, in which he proposed the fundamental conjecture that “all the organic beings which have ever lived on this earth have descended from some one primordial form.”1 In the extrapolation of this concept, millions of progressive life forms should have developed in an evolutionary continuum along all the different branches of life leading up to the huge diversity of plants and animals that are alive today. Many current biology textbooks depict this universal common ancestry as a “tree of life” similar to the analogy that Darwin first proposed over 160 years ago.
This evolutionary tree of life Darwin got going has many problems explaining both living organisms and the fossil record. Chief among them is the lack of transitional forms. Not only do we not see one fundamental type of creature evolving into another today, we see no evidence of transitional forms in the fossil record. Renowned evolutionary paleontologist Stephen J. Gould admitted this embarrassing fact:
The extreme rarity of transitional forms in the fossil record persists as the trade secret of paleontology. The evolutionary trees that adorn our textbooks have data only at the tips and nodes of their branches; the rest is inference, however reasonable, not the evidence of fossils.2
In Darwin’s day the fossil record was much less documented than it is today, but one of its most embarrassing enigmas deeply troubled him—the Cambrian Explosion. Its glaring contradiction of evolutionary expectations still remains. In the Cambrian Explosion, numerous forms of highly complex animal life appeared suddenly in the rock record with absolutely no evolutionary precursors.
At the time Darwin’s Origin was published in the 1800s, the lowest-most fossiliferous rock layer where complex life first appears—what we now call the Cambrian—was then known as the Silurian. Concerning this explosion of life and the problem it posed for his theory, Darwin stated:
Consequently, if my theory be true, it is indisputable that before the lowest Silurian stratum was deposited, long periods elapsed, as long as, or probably far longer than, the whole interval from the Silurian age to the present day; and that during these vast, yet quite unknown, periods of time, the world swarmed with living creatures. To the question why we do not find records of these vast primordial periods, I can give no satisfactory answer….But the difficulty of understanding the absence of vast piles of fossiliferous strata, which on my theory no doubt were somewhere accumulated before the Silurian epoch, is very great.1
Evolutionists claim the Cambrian rock layers were first laid down about 540 million years ago. Highly complex multicellular creatures known as metazoans and a plethora of hard-shelled creatures suddenly appear in these sedimentary strata. Examples include clams, snails, horseshoe crabs, trilobites, sponges, brachiopods, worms, jellyfish, sea urchins, sea cucumbers, starfish, brittle stars, sea lilies, and other complex invertebrates.
Making this mystery even more evolution-defying is the fact that the rock layers below the Cambrian are devoid of invertebrates. While this was known in Darwin’s day, the mystery has never been resolved, and a 2018 study reported that a thorough re-analysis of the Precambrian Ediacaran sediments showed they are completely empty of evolutionary ancestors. The researchers stated, “The lack of euarthropod body fossils in the Ediacaran biota is mirrored in all other preservational regimes in the Precambrian, including BSTs [Burgess Shale type deposits], phosphatised microfossils, and chert deposits.”3 They also found that the ancestors to the Cambrian creatures were “strikingly absent” in the Ediacaran period.
The Cambrian strata are rich with fossils of creatures whose counterparts can still be found alive today essentially looking the same as their predecessors buried supposedly hundreds of millions of years ago. In other words, these so-called living fossils have not evolved at all, a phenomenon evolutionists call stasis. Not only do these creatures show no sign of evolutionary change, but many also disappear in rock layers above the Cambrian only to reappear as modern living creatures. While evolutionists have no good explanation why such creatures would abruptly appear hundreds of millions of years ago and then disappear for millions of years only to reappear and now be happily alive, a biblical Flood-based interpretation perfectly explains the data. Creationists know from both the rock record and the Scriptures that the Genesis Flood was a progressive year-long global event. The succession of fossils in the rock strata largely represents the progressive burial of ecological zones characterized by the plants and animals they contained. Thus, the Cambrian strata contain ocean-dwelling animals that would have been the first creatures to be killed and buried in Flood sediments.
An excellent example of a living fossil from the Cambrian is the brachiopod. It has a hard shell like a clam, only in a different configuration. The term “brachiopod” is derived from the Greek words brachion (arm) and podos (foot), which refers to the long pedicle that protrudes from a foramen (opening) in the shell that affixes the marine creature to the base of its burrow in the ocean floor.
Another example of a Cambrian living fossil is the amazing horseshoe crab. This curious complex arthropod with 10 eyes plays an important role in the ocean’s ecosystem. Because horseshoe crabs come up onto the shorelines and beaches to reproduce, they are commonly observed around the world.
Yet another living fossil from the Cambrian is the brittle star, which is found in many ocean ecosystems in a huge diversity of species. Brittle stars are similar to starfish but have much longer snake-like arms that protrude from a central disc. They can reproduce sexually as well as through fission where the central disc divides in two and the newly created discs grow arms.
Extraordinary soft-bodied fossil preservation is known as Lagerstätte (German lager “storage/lair” and stätte “place”). Cambrian Lagerstättes provide spectacular examples of fossils of soft-bodied creatures with exceptionally preserved details. These fossils speak of a rapid cataclysmic burial in fine sediments in the very recent past. Some of the best examples of this near-perfect fossilization can be found in the Cambrian Maotianshan shales, Burgess Shale, and the recently exploited Qingjiang biota (supposedly ~518 million years old) that is chock-full of complex creatures.4 One group of soft-bodied creatures found in a large diversity of body plans are cnidarians, which contain many creature types that are still alive today and are therefore classified as living fossils. Cnidarians include a variety of stationary types (sea anemones, corals, sea pens) and swimming varieties (jellyfish, box jellies). Cambrian ctenophore fossils are also found in abundance in a wide variety of body plans, and many types of ctenophores are also still alive today.
In addition to the huge array of soft-bodied creatures, Cambrian deposits contain many different types of complex creatures with a chitinous skin or exoskeleton (shell). One amazing example of a Cambrian invertebrate alive today is the Kinorhyncha (mud dragon), a common small marine invertebrate that lives in mud and sand. Another excellent example would be a group of unsegmented marine worms called priapulids that are also alive today. Only a rapid catastrophic burial such as that recorded in Genesis could account for this exceptional preservation. And the fact that these soft-bodied creatures appear suddenly with no evolutionary precursors with many still alive today totally refutes evolution.
The incredible preservation of soft tissue impressions combined with an explosion of animal life in virtually every conceivable body plan with no evolutionary precursors utterly defies all naturalistic explanations—as does the fact that fossils from these rock layers contain soft tissues. The presence of actual undecayed tissues in fossils found at virtually every level of the geologic column completely undermines evolution’s deep-time paradigm.
Secular researchers have published at least 113 different technical papers describing the presence of soft tissues and biomolecules in fossils supposedly millions of years old.5 Examples include mummified dinosaur skin, dinosaur blood hemoglobin, and dried-up eyeball retinas from a mosasaur.6-7 The problem is that the science of tissue decay doesn’t permit millions of years. This evolutionarily inconvenient fact makes a 2014 soft tissue discovery one of the most spectacular—original pliable marine worm tube tissue found just below the bottom-most layer of the Cambrian.8-9
Publishing in the Journal of Paleontology, researchers detailed delicate fossil casings manufactured by beard worms in a rock layer just below the Cambrian dated at 551 million years. The buried fossils had chitin-containing worm tubes that look exactly the same as those made by living tube worms. In fact, the complex and intricate structural cross-layering of the fibers is still visible.
One of the most confounding anti-evolutionary features of these fossil worm casings was that they were not mineralized at all. Permineralization is a fossil-forming process in which mineral deposits form internal casts of organisms by filling the spaces within tissue. In the case of these tube worm casings, the researchers ruled out preservation by different forms of mineralization. They stated, “Minerals have not replicated any part of the soft tissue and the carbonaceous material of the wall is primary [not replaced], preserving the original layering of the wall, its texture, and fabrics.”9 The paper included electron micrographs of some of those fabrics’ fossilized fibers. In fact, it described the worm casings as still “flexible, as shown by its soft deformation.” And affirming that original biomolecules were still intact, the authors stated, “The body wall of S. cambriensis [fossil worm] comprises a chitin-structural protein composite.”9 The notion that chitin or any intact biological material like soft tissue can last longer than a million years has no experimental support. The only valid explanation of these fossils is that the tube worms, which we know from living specimens lived at depths of 100 to 10,000 meters in the ocean, obviously would have been amongst the first creatures buried in the global Flood.
The Cambrian Explosion is a complete evolutionary enigma for a number of important reasons. First, incredibly complex animal life appeared suddenly and without any sign of preceding evolutionary ancestors. Second, many creatures that appeared in the Cambrian layers have living counterparts today that show no sign of evolution—a paradox evolutionists label living fossils. Third, tube worms (another living fossil) have been found in rocks just below the Cambrian, and their fossils yielded soft, pliable tissue. The fact that their tissue, along with many other examples, is still soft and undecayed indicates they were buried only thousands of years ago in the global Flood described in Genesis.
Thus, according to a model of progressive burial by ecological zonation, we see that the Cambrian layers were the first to be deposited near the beginning of the global Flood in the sedimentary rock strata known by geologists as the Sauk Megasequence.10 The evidence provided by Cambrian fossils continues to say “no” to evolutionary expectations.
* Dr. Tomkins is Director of Research at the Institute for Creation Research and earned his Ph.D. in genetics from Clemson University.
bkmk
Maybe aliens terra forming earth? If so, I wonder if we are what they expected.
, millions of progressive life forms should have developed in an evolutionary continuum along all the different branches...”
“... we see no evidence of transitional forms in the fossil record. “
“...rock layers below the Cambrian are devoid of invertebrates.”
They have.
Yes, we do.
No, they aren’t.
We hardly understand God at all.
How could we? He is infinite and Great.
We know so little yet we think we know so much.
If evolution is part of God’s great plan then so be it.
People get threatened too easily STILL by science if they fear it may threaten belief in God.
I BELIEVE, and I learned to believe through trials and tribulations.
People are willing to trust Q’s plan more than they are willing to trust God’s!
No offense Q folks.
If evolution was part if His Plan, who am I to question it?
And yeah, evolution is pretty real.
Fixed the title for everyone.
“On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life”
BY CHARLES DARWIN, M.A.
LONDON: JOHN MURRAY, ALBEMARLE STREET. 1859
Some years back, noting that what is taught as science in schools is often far out of date, even to the point that I recall one biologist saying that among the first things they had to do with serious students is to help them get rid of all their previous knowledge from school, I pondered what is to be gained by teaching falsified ideas.
At the time I joked that bad science books must be cheaper than good.
However, on a more serious note the purpose of teaching evolution, even Darwin’s own ideas, is to ge5 kids used to thinking about reality in such a way that no god is needed, in a way that is agreeable to the secularists etc.
The basis fo4 5his view is being aware that people can have other reasons to believe in something that is not only more important than that something but will dictate what is useful to be believed.
Thus we see Marx, on reading Darwin, writing to Engels that he’d found a basis in naturalism for their views, which is to say he must have recognized that if there can be natural selection there can also be unnatural selection by the heavy hand of the State and propaganda to make men-like beings that do not share the nature of Man enough to actually be what Marx fantasized about.
Lysenkoism, or the idea of making nature more socialist, doesn’t fall far from the tree after all.
Likewise we currently see the Left accepting genderism for similar other reasons to believe (as Cultural Marxists they labor to set the world on fire, to tear down everything under a delusion of magical thinking that once everything that hasn’t worked to produce utopia has been cast aside they will somehow find themselves in the utopia they seek ... to which I would counter that while Reason may be a potential master it is at least a master that you can choose, whereas Passion arising from irrational desires is what does the choosing as is subsides people into madness.
“ They have.
Yes, we do.
No, they aren’t.”
LOL
I agree.
You are today’s winner of the most pithy comment.
After 2020, there’s a scene out of Prometheus which answers your question nicely.
An aside here. In late 2019, I had the honor of listening to a short speech given to our local astronomy chapter by Dr. Harrison Schmitt, the only actual scientist (geologist) to walk on the moon. He stated that study of the surface of the moon showed the light from the sun changed at about the same time as the Cambrian Explosion. He didn’t elaborate, I just thought it was an interesting tidbit.
Occam’s razor.
Presented with 2 competing explanations. The one that requires the smallest number of assumptions is usually correct.
1) Did the Cambrian Evolution Explosion occur leaving no transitional fossil records yet to be found anywhere that would prove to be evidence to support a progressive evolutionary continuum to higher complex life forms and specie.
Or
2) God created all living things.
>“... we see no evidence of transitional forms in the fossil record. “
>Yes, we do.
What is the last common ancestor of man and any ape?
What is the last common ancestor of any A and B?
All leaves and no tree.
Check out several articles on Edicara Period. The last period of the Pre-Cambrian before the “Cambrian Explosion”
Agree - thanks.
Evolution the greatest hoax in the history of modern man.
[[If evolution is part of God’s great plan then so be it.]]
We know enough to know that there’s too much evidence against the idea that everything evolved from other species- Nature would have to engage in SUPERNATURAL events for macroevolution to happen- We also know that Microevolution is fact- it’s called adaptation- survival of the fittest- ie certain traits within a species kind, are kept while less useful traits or features get lost- this again is adaption, and fully within the possibilities because no new non species specific information is being created- microevoloution deals only with species specific information
There are systems and features in species that could not have arisen naturally- they needed a supernatural event to happen in order to come into existence- They also needed a Designer to assemble them-
also the lack of transitional species remains, and failed transitional remains should be staggering amount, but they aren’t- instead we find fully formed creatures that are still alive today that go back as far as possible- all at once-
[[If evolution was part if His Plan, who am I to question it?]]
You are you- Lots of people question it- and for good reason- Macroevolution doesn’t make sense- Mathematically, it’s impossible, not just improbable, but impossible- just for one macro-evolving change to take place, let alone billions and billions needed to ‘create’ all the varied species we have today- It is so far into the realm of impossibility mathematically, that it means just that- it’s impossible, no chance it could happen- not even once-
William Demski has a site chockerblock full of mathematical evidence proving that- A science symposium a few decades ago held by major mathematicians met and concluded nope- couldn’t happen- I believe it was in chicago- These were not ‘Christian scientists’ either- these were top scientists in their fields- WYSTAR I think was the name of it- Anyways- Macroevolution isn’t just mathematically impossible, it’s also biologically impossible, microbiologically impossible. And this is just for 1 ‘positive mutation’ to ‘add new NON Species specific information’ to a species to begin the process of moving one species kind to another- let alone the billions upon billions of changes needed as mentioned before, going from muck to man
It’s not the huge mystery that folks think- we do know quite a bit-
Introducing reality on a creationism thread? That’s like criticizing the south on a civil war thread.
Thanks for the post.
[[Check out several articles on Edicara Period.]]
unless they have found something since 2018, then it still stands that there’s nothing there?
“The Fossils Still Say No
Making this mystery even more evolution-defying is the fact that the rock layers below the Cambrian are devoid of invertebrates. While this was known in Darwin’s day, the mystery has never been resolved, and a 2018 study reported that a thorough re-analysis of the Precambrian Ediacaran sediments showed they are completely empty of evolutionary ancestors. The researchers stated, “The lack of euarthropod body fossils in the Ediacaran biota is mirrored in all other preservational regimes in the Precambrian, including BSTs [Burgess Shale type deposits], phosphatised microfossils, and chert deposits.”3 They also found that the ancestors to the Cambrian creatures were “strikingly absent” in the Ediacaran period.”
https://www.icr.org/article/12519
However, Newton's theories are perfectly adequate when designing bridges, roads, buildings, etc. Things that aren't moving fast or accelerating much follow Newton's equations quite accurately.
Similarly much of Darwin's theories might still be true even though there are gaps that need to be filled by a more refined theory.
The most compelling arguments against Darwin's theories are those associated with there not being a sufficient amount of time for us to see the amount of diversity that we do see. This is even more the case when we find out about the several mass extinction events and episodes like the Cambrian Explosion that suggest there is even less time for evolution to occur.
However, evolutionists are now exploring things like epigenetics where the environment can have a positive effect on leading evolution into a favorable direction rather than being completely random. I believe that some evolutionists are wary of epigenetics because it seems to them to be an only slightly veiled version of Larmarckism which they have banished to the same place they sent vitalism.
I'm hoping that evolutionists will open themselves up to the possibility that epigenetics and the nature of basic chemical reactions will show that evolution is not mutation with random selection, but instead is more like mutation with selection mediated by the environment.
This could be an answer to why we see so much diversity in such a short amount of time.
Once I learned darwin was a life long avowed atheist, I quickly discounted every single thing he ever babbled on about...
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