Cambrian Explosion Caught on Film

An explosion is coming: a devastating blast against Darwinism in the form of a dynamite new film from Illustra Media: Darwin’s Dilemma: The Mystery of the Cambrian Fossil Record. The Cambrian explosion, which Darwin admitted was the greatest challenge to his theory, has not been solved in the 150 years since The Origin. In fact, it has gotten much worse. This film does more than demolish a defunct idea. It offers the only alternative that does explain the sudden appearance of all the animal phyla: intelligent design...

I am sure that the fact that the Cambrian explosion started 530 million years ago and lasted for 70 to 80 million years get in the way of their little movie

Real scientists publish papers for peer review, not release fictions films.

GGG you do realize that Al Gore, and Michael Moore also made movies, I guess that means that they knew what they were talking about too?

Must be true because I saw on the silver screen.

“Easily the biggest challenge facing the ID community is to develop a full-fledged theory of biological design. We don’t have such a theory right now, and that’s a problem. Without a theory, it’s very hard to know where to direct your research focus. Right now, we’ve got a bag of powerful intuitions, and a handful of notions such as ‘irreducible complexity’ and ‘specified complexity’-but, as yet, no general theory of biological design.” ~ Paul Nelson Fellow Discovery Institute Touchstone Magazine 7/8 (2004): pp 64 – 65.

“The important thing about Intelligent Design is that it is not a theory - which is something I think they need to make more clear” ~ Michael Medved Senior Fellow Discovery Institute.

For the further edification of all, I'll show all of Medved’s statement:

“One on One: Broadcast views
Aug. 6, 2008
Ruthie Blum Leibowitz , THE JERUSALEM POST

Q. Speaking of your desire for this kind of particularity, you are a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute that studies and believes in Intelligent Design. How do you, as an Orthodox Jew, reconcile with this kind of generality - with the view of their being a hierarchy with a chief “designer” - while believing in and praying to a very specific God?

A. The important thing about Intelligent Design is that it is not a theory - which is something I think they need to make more clear. Nor is Intelligent Design an explanation. Intelligent Design is a challenge. It's a challenge to evolution. It does not replace evolution with something else.

Q. The question is not whether it replaces evolution, but whether it replaces God.

A. No, you see, Intelligent Design doesn't tell you what is true; it tells you what is not true. It tells you that it cannot be that this whole process was random.”

I added the Qs and As for clarity.

Is there a difference between making films and writing books? Scientists write books too but, of course there's no fiction in them, no, never, no?

You seemed to have overlooked the fact that two members of the staff at the Discovery Institute stated that intelligent design is not a scientific theory.

A peer-reviewed paper is quite different from writing a book, but then anybody with a rudimentary knowledge of science would know that.

“Science is uncertain. Theories are subject to revision; observations are open to a variety of interpretations, and scientists quarrel amongst themselves. This is disillusioning for those untrained in the scientific method, who thus turn to the rigid certainty of the Bible instead. There is something comfortable about a view that allows for no deviation and that spares you the painful necessity of having to think.” — Isaac Asimov

http://www.todayinsci.com/QuotationsCategories/C_Cat/Creationist-Quotations.htm

I didn't overlook it at all, nor did I comment on it. I did think it good to have the source and Medved’s full statement available or did you overlook that?

And so that all may understand the level of your logic here:

“The Origin of Intelligent Design:
A brief history of the scientific theory of intelligent design
by Jonathan Witt, Ph.D.
Senior Fellow, Discovery Institute”

And they DO list peer reviewed papers. Or did overlook that too?

Seeing that Asimov was an atheist I can understand why he would make such a comment on the Bible.

And given his arrogance, the last part is understandable too.

“This film does more than demolish a defunct idea. It offers the only alternative that does explain the sudden appearance of all the animal phyla: intelligent design.”

—“all” animal phyla?

From E. O. Wilson’s “The Diversity of Life”: “The number of living animal phyla … is about thirty-three. Of these, approximately twenty comprise animals large and abundant enough to leave fossils of the kind preserved in beds of the Burgess Shale type. The number of Cambrian phyla identified with confidence remains at eleven.”

That was in 2001. Doing a bit of research to see what the latest numbers are, it looks like there are now 36 animal phyla (due to some reclassifying), and of these about 17 are thought to be identified from the Cambrian fossil record (so almost half). And of these 17, most existed prior to the Cambrian Explosion (Porifera, Mollusca, Annelida, Cnidaria, and Arthropoda, and probably Chordata, Nematode, Echinodermata, Brachiopods, and Placozoa). Most of the rest are known to appear well after the Cambrian (e.g. Rotifers, Onychophora, Nematomorpha, Echiura, Annelida).

So of the 36 or so phyla, perhaps 7-10 originated during the Cambrian Explosion (and that number could shrink as the fossil record of the pre-Cambrian improves). There are many sources that say “most” phyla appeared during the CE, but from the data, that’s a pretty gross exaggeration. More phyla appeared both before, and after the CE, than what appeared during the CE itself.
Saying “all” animal phyla appeared during the CE is utterly asinine.

Also, many of the animals that are categorized into separate phyla during the Cambrian are actually very close morphologically. No sane taxonomist who happened to live at the time would have separated them into different phyla. The only reason we do so now is because, we, with hindsight, know how their descendents diversified. A good term I’ve heard for this is “retrospective coronation”.

“The Cambrian explosion, which Darwin admitted was the greatest challenge to his theory, has not been solved in the 150 years since The Origin. In fact, it has gotten much worse.”

—Actually, it’s gotten for less problematic. In Darwin’s time, many thought it was the birth of life – which was quite an issue considering that it already had multicellular life. At the time, no pre-Cambrian fossils were known. We now know that life extends back about 3 billion years before the CE. Multicellular life begins well over a billion years before the CE. And we now know that many animal phyla originate prior to the CE. The “Cambrian Explosion” has been fizzling.

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