Cambrian Explosion: punctuated trillobites (Introduction)

by David Turell , Friday, January 27, 2017, 04:43 (2836 days ago) @ David Turell

There are no precursors before the trilobites and the succeeding animals are very different. Come and go totally without Darwin grfadulaism. Punctuated equilibrium is a fancy term to describe what we do not know about speciation:

http://www.evolutionnews.org/2017/01/irony_alert_mic103445.html

"How about those fossils that appear "as though they were planted there," as Richard Dawkins once admitted. One of those "planted" classes, the humble trilobites, had eyes that were perhaps the most complex ever produced by nature.1 One expert called them "an all-time feat of function optimization."
And even Shermer's go-to source, Wikipedia, admits ancestral forms, err, "do not seem to exist":

"Early trilobites show all the features of the trilobite group as a whole; transitional or ancestral forms showing or combining the features of trilobites with other groups (e.g. early arthropods) do not seem to exist.

"Likewise, even the evolutionist Niles Eldredge admitted2 they didn't make sense in light of standard evolutionary theory:

"If this theory were correct, then I should have found evidence of this smooth progression in the vast numbers of Bolivian fossil trilobites I studied. I should have found species gradually changing through time, with smoothly intermediate forms connecting descendant species to their ancestors.

"Instead I found most of the various kinds, including some unique and advanced ones, present in the earliest known fossil beds. Species persisted for long periods of time without change. When they were replaced by similar, related (presumably descendant) species, I saw no gradual change in the older species that would have allowed me to predict the anatomical features of its younger relative.

"And it just gets worse:

"The story of anatomical change through time that I read in the Devonian trilobites of Gondwana is similar to the picture emerging elsewhere in the fossil record: long periods of little or no change, followed by the appearance of anatomically modified descendants, usually with no smoothly intergradational forms in evidence."

Comment: Evolution is a staccato dance from on distinct species to another. There never is any gradualism. Darwin's only contribution is to show us that it seems we evolved from earlier simpler life which was a common singular source. Period.