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100 Reasons to Choose Biblical Creation Over Evolution
35. The Cambrian Explosion
According to the evolution story, life evolved from simple to complex over the last 3.5 billion years or so, and this progression can be traced upward through the rock layers. It is claimed that the further down we dig into the earth, the further back in time we find ourselves, and where we discover fossils, these fossils will reveal clearly the evolutionary order (fish to amphibians to reptiles to mammals and birds and so on).
The lowest rocks on this "geologic column" are called pre-Cambrian, and supposedly represent a time before life evolved on our planet. Consequently, very few fossils have been discovered in rocks designated pre-Cambrian. The layer above the pre-Cambrian, you guess it, is called the Cambrian, and this layer is said to represent an era which saw the rapid rise of life on our planet. So rich in fossil material are these rock layers that some refer to the diversity of life found in them as the "Cambrian Explosion."
The problem is that life found in "Cambrian" rock layers is incredibly diverse and complexA. The trilobite, for example, is an extremely complex creature, equipped with a very unique set of calcite-based eyes, specially suited for underwater visionB. This and thousands of other highly complex, specialized creatures appear as fossils in this supposedly ancient era of earth's history. In fact, today we have 38 phyla (a certain classification of living things) whereas in the Cambrian era, we find no less than 50 phyla. This is not predicted by the evolution story at all C.
The so-called "simple" life forms that appear in Cambrian rock layers are, for the most part, ocean dwelling organisms, which moved about on the sea floor. Their position in the fossil record, near the bottom of the column does not mean that they were the first animals to have evolved (their complexity ought to be enough to determine that). It more likely means that there was a catastrophe - a flood - in which animals such as clams, snails, and trilobites would have been the first life forms to be buried in sediment. The Cambrian explosion is better interpreted in light of the biblical flood of Noah's day.
35. The Cambrian Explosion - Notes and References
A. "The most famous such burst, the Cambrian explosion, marks the inception of modern, multicellular life. Within just a few million years, nearly every major kind of animal anatomy appears in the fossil record for the first time…The Precambrian record is now sufficiently good that the old rationale about undiscovered sequences of smoothly transitional forms will no longer wash." Stephen J. Gould, "An Asteroid to Die For", Discover, October 1989, p.65
"And we find many of them [Cambrian Fossils] already in an advanced state of evolution, the very first time they appear. It is as though they were just planted there, without any evolutionary history. Needless to say, this appearance of sudden planting has delighted creationists." Richard Dawkins, "The Blind Watchmaker", London, W.W. Norton &#amp; Company, 1987, p.229
B. The trilobite was described as having "the most sophisticated eye lenses ever produced by nature" See: Science News, 105, February 2, 1974, p.72
"In fact, this optical doublet is a device so typically associated with human invention that its discovery in trilobites comes as something of a shock. The realization that trilobites developed and used such devices half a billion years ago makes the shock even greater. And a final discovery - that the refracting interface between the two lense elements in a trilobite's eye was designed in accordance with optical constructions worked out by Descartes and Huygens in the mid-seventeenth century - borders on sheer science fiction…The design of the trilobite's eye lens could well qualify for a patent disclosure." Richard Levi-Setti, "Trilobites", 2 Ed., University Chicago Press, 1993, pp.54-57
C. "Stephen Jay Gould has referred to this as the reverse cone of diversity. The theory of evolution implies that things get more complex and get more and more diverse from one single origin. But the whole thing turns out to be reversed - we have more diverse groups in the very beginning, and in fact more and more of them die off over time, and we have less and less now." Paul Chien(Chairman, Biology Dept., University of San Fransico), "Explosion of Life", www.origins.org/real/ri9701/chien.html, p.2, Cited in Walt Brown, "In the Beginning, 7th Ed", p.55