Cambrian Explosion:study reduces the Ediacaran period (Introduction)

by dhw, Sunday, December 23, 2018, 09:25 (2162 days ago) @ David Turell

QUOTE: "Moreover, the scientists' data series reveal that the development of the fauna took place within a very short period. The transition from the "Ediacara biota" – multi-celled but very simply organisms – to the diverse Cambrian life forms occurred over less than 410,000 years. "From a geological point of view, this represents a veritable sprint," according to the research team. Based on the current study, this rapid faunal change may be best explained as a kind of "biological arms race": New fundamental traits accelerated the subsequent evolution and fueled the next "adaptive breakthrough." "For example, if an organisms became increasingly mobile and fed on prey, previously even less mobile animals had to come up with new ways to protect themselves – which may have led to the rapid development of shells or skeletons. One achievement thus engendered the next – and, by necessity, within a shortened period of time," says Linnemann in summary. (David’s bold)

DAVID: The striking finding is the brief time the Ediacarans existed. The Cambrians are so complex they required the appearance of an enormous number of beneficial mutations to create the new organ systems that were required. The bolded area above is based on the usual Darwinian survival trope. This gap requires a designing mind working at full speed driving the evolution.

dhw: Even if 410,000 (4,100 centuries!) is regarded as a “short” time, each generation must rapidly find means of survival if it comes under threat, and so the “usual Darwinian trope” makes perfect sense. This is more than can be said of the hypothesis that your God had to specially design this vast variety of organs and organisms to provide lots of different foods for all the different varieties of organisms in order to keep life going until he could specially design the only variety of organs/organisms he wanted to design: i.e. the brain of H. sapiens. (David's bold)

DAVID: You have turned logic on its head. According to you, the rapid change is blamed on a survival threat. There is no evidence of that, only your theory. Your BIG IF, bolded, is assumed because of Darwin 's assumptions that a struggle for survival drives major changes. There has never been any evidence for it. Only design explains the gap. As an analogy an Ediacaran organism is as simple as a travois used by plains Indians compared to a Cambrian organism as an 18-wheeler. No Ediacarans survived. They were replaced totally! That doesn't look like survival to me. You keep telling me to debate you, not Darwin, but your theories are polluted by your previous inculcation from your readings of Darwin.

Once more, NOBODY knows the cause of speciation or of the Cambrian explosion. NOBODY can do anything other than provide a theory. There has never been any evidence that a supernatural being suddenly decided to do away with Ediacarans and invent lots of new organs and organisms in order to provide more food for these lots of new organisms until he could design the only thing he really wanted to design, which was the brain of H. sapiens. The theory that a change in the atmosphere allowed for a new range of organisms, which in turn led to the process described above by Linnemann, at least makes sense. Nobody is denying the enormous leaps in complexity, and I accept your criticism that we have no evidence to prove that organisms are capable of such leaps. If we had the evidence, the theory would become a fact. The theory that survival plays a major role in evolution is not a Darwinian pollutant. I think Darwin was absolutely right, and in any case I regard it as sheer common sense that survivability is of vital importance to the evolutionary process. See "Divine purposes and methods".