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.
By nothing i mean invertebrates
Reality Check - Evolution is just a randomized version of Selective Breeding. We know that we can breed tall horses, small horses, fat horse, thin horses and different color horses. But - we CANNOT breed a horse with six legs.
Evolution just does not explain the fossil record. It is just not powerful enough.
“What is the last common ancestor of any A and B?”
You and your sister or brother, and your parents.
Just go backwards until you get dizzy.
>Just go backwards until you get dizzy.
Me <==... Noah & Naamah <==... Adam & Eve <== God
>However, evolutionists are now exploring things like epigenetics where the environment can have a positive effect on leading evolution
If life could emerge from random goo, it would have been reproduced in the 1800s. It would be happening somewhere right now. If it came from outer space, same thing somewhere else. Abiogenesis is a zombie theory.
I’m a computer programmer and DNA is like computer code. I think (the appearance of) “evolution” is just God reusing code to make new species, just like we do now in labs except He could make new creatures full grown from scratch.
But I don’t believe God was in any hurry.
Saved for later full read.
You are trying to make God into your own image of who YOU want to believe He is. Either God is who he said He is in His Divinely inspired Word, or he is an evil liar. His word clearly explained how He created everything in 6 days. He clearly explained how he destroyed all living beings (except for Noah and his family and the animals in the ark), then life started all over again from them. If God continues to add new creation of “species (kinds)” then he would have said so. Literally everything God said and 100% of the prophesy in his Word (Bible) that He inspired has proven to be correct.
It was WISTAR...I believe. Even before WISTAR I was aware of the mathemetical challenges to time and chance scenarios. The exponential growth of information about the structural and operational complexity of the genome since WISTAR clearly indicates that time and chance as blind operators are incapable of concocting such a dynamic structure. The hackneyed argument that “we are here” and therefore evolution had to occur is not adequate for discussion.
No, they are not.
The obvious dilemma he had too was that you just didn’t see selection of the most fit features among the population because the features remain rather constant; People have 2 eyes, not 3 or 1, which would give those features a chance to show their fitness. Always 2 ears for man, no more, no less. Six fingers remains an genetic anomaly, but is insignificant. If it were a Darwinian world, we’d see all sorts of competetive features, but that never is.
And never mind that the theory is plain stupid. From the beginning of humanity, the sperm knew how to travel against gravity, up the walls of the cervix, up the wall of the uterus, right into the tiny hole of the Fallopian tube, and along that trail towards its end, there to meet up with an ovarian egg, that happens to be waiting conception. Will he say that only those with smart sperm survive? Or that it took x number of sperms to impregnate the ovum, and those did not succeed until only one was allowed the privilege?It’s all so absurd.
From the beginning, food that enters the mouth, into the stomach, was dissolved by HCl. Was it some other weak acid that could not compete at first that made its debut, before HCl came along? Cannot be because life could then not exist. It’s all so ridiculous.
>You are trying to make God into your own image of who YOU want to believe He is.
On the contrary. I hold the inerrancy of Scripture, all of it. It is you who constrain God to your view of certain passages while ignoring the rest and without understanding modern knowledge of the context.
Daniel 12:4 “But thou, O Daniel, shut up the words, and seal the book, even to the time of the end: many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall be increased.”
Psalm 90:4 “For a thousand years in thy sight are but as yesterday when it is past, and as a watch in the night.”
2 Peter 3:8 “But, beloved, be not ignorant of this one thing, that one day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day.”
Those two verses literally explain how Adam lived 930 years, at least 900 after the Fall (Gen 5:3-5), even though God said Adam would die the same day as the Fall (Gen 2:17). They can also mean very long times in human term, thus the length of God’s day is indeterminable, as the following proves possible:
1 John 1:5 “This then is the message which we have heard of him, and declare unto you, that God is light, and in him is no darkness at all.”
According to Einstein’s Relativity, for photons, light, all time happens at once. If you understand that, a lot falls into place.
Genesis 1:3 “And God said, Let there be light: and there was [the Big Bang].”
I think, but I could be persuaded differently as new data comes, that the Flood occurred 12,300 years ago at the start of the Younger Dryas period from a meteor strike at Hiawatha Crater in the Greenland ice cap that vaporized enough water to drop 23 feet of rain (Gen 7:20) over all the land masses and caused mass extinctions, including the human Clovis culture among others.
The Bible says that God can be found by study of His creation.
Psalm 19:19 “The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handywork. 2 Day unto day uttereth speech, and night unto night sheweth knowledge.”
1 Thessalonians 5:21 “Prove all things; hold fast that which is good.”
From you wikilink
.....Determining where Ediacaran organisms fit in the tree of life has proven challenging; it is not even established that they were animals.....
BUt they were still life, well before the Cambrian.
If life could emerge from gas goo, Eric swallaells britches would be wild Kingdom on steroids
True and. I’m not saying there weren’t invertebrates before Cambrian, just that as far as I’m aware, there haven t been any discovered yet. Simple life perhaps but certainly not the amount t of transitional needed for the biologically impossible process of macroevolution to produce the mass variety and diversity found in cambrian
That sounds familiar. These scie tests of. Course got very fierce blowback, but they maintained their stance. Macroevokution was mathematically impossible, even for just one positive mutation to add enough new infor action to the species kind In an attempt to move the species kind into a whole new kind.
William demski, whom those who support macroevo.ution hate, expounded on the impossibi,it’s even further. His work is dismissed because it doesn’t fit the hypothesis of evolution,but the numbers just don’t lie, they are solar beyond the realm of possibility, for even one, that there is no possibility left.
You can go to his site and see the counter arguments that desperately try to defend the occurrence of just one possibi,possibility,, but the fact remains that even if we were very generous, and ignored the impossibi,it for one, there is still the massive prob,problem, of billions of impossible changes needed following g the first impossible change
The lottery is early impossible but still possible. Macroevolution however smashes the upper probabi.ity limits that there’s simply no way one could have happened .et alone billions, leaving the on,y viable alternative that a designer had to have supernatural powers in order to create life from nothing. Nature is not capable of it.
At best it can only alter info already present to produce a deadly condition that weirdly has a small benefit such as in si kle cell anemia protecting against malaria. It isn’t macroevolution in action, that is adaption that works oninfo already present, it doesn’t introduce new non species specific Info .ike macro needs to move species outside its own kind.
The closest example of introduced info into a diff. Species is when they put a gene fro a spider into goats who then produced silk in their milk, but I believe that the goats protective info in its ma,yep prevent it from passing along this weird man introduced anomaly.
Xpe is have several layers of built in protections to keep their genome from becoming convoluted to the point of non vizbi,ity. This is a huge problem for the hypothesis of Macroevolution
Forgive all the typos, working on a tablet and not goods at the onboard keyboard
ping
Keep on babbling-I still ain’t listening...
What are the pre-Cambrian invertebrate species?
Based on what (other than observed evolution within species)?
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