Explosion? What Explosion?

 An idle thought on Father’s Day.

The Cambrian Explosion that actually wasn’t.

To this day Christian extremists describe the Cambrian Explosion as the sudden appearance of advanced animal life on the planet which can only be explained by God creating it.

Meanwhile, back in the real world, many paleontologists are declining to call the event the Cambrian Explosion any longer. This is because it is clearly not an explosion. It was a diversification, a radiation of already existing life.  This is exactly the sort of thing that has happened time and time again throughout evolutionary history.

Scientists are merely human, so, for about a century, they refused to recognize any fossils from the preceding Ediacaran era.  After all, they said, we know there aren’t any. So first of all, we won’t look. Second, if somebody claims he found some, we will just ignore him (or her).

Now that we finally recognize their existence and have found fossil beds containing them, we know that there was even a bilaterian before the Cambrian.  (That’s an advanced form of life, including you and me, that wasn’t supposed to exist prior to the “explosion”.)

Even Darwin recognized the problem of advanced bilaterian and complex animal life suddenly popping into existence. Because he was an honest man and a really competent scientist, part of his revolutionary work included the careful and detailed listing of all the possible objections to his theory of natural selection. The most telling, he acknowledged, was the absence of fossils prior to the Cambrian. Fossils which we have now found.

The Christian extremists refer to this as “Darwins doubt”. This is nonsense. Darwin did not doubt his theory. He just recognized that this was a valid objection to his conclusions. It is sad that he did not live to know all that has been found since his time which confirms, again and again and again, that he was correct.

From the net:

> Roger Mason (born 4 May 1941) is an English geologist. He is known as the discoverer of Ediacaran fossils, although it was later found that a then 15-year-old schoolgirl named Tina Negus had discovered the first Charnia fossil a year before he did.<

Notice that in this rare case, Tina Negas actually gets sort of a secondary, footnote kind of recognition for her discovery. In most cases, she isn’t even mentioned.  Wonder why? The school boy who found it a year after she did is honored. She’s almost entirely forgotten, even though she discovered it a year earlier, in the same forest where he discovered it. Makes me wonder if it was exactly the same fossil!  Hmmmm…

An add-on from two days later:

To make it clear that Darwin had no “doubts” let us quote him. “Consequently, if my theory be true, it is indisputable that before the lowest Cambrian stratum was deposited,… the world swarmed with living creatures.”  – Darwin, 1859.

A prediction which now has been proven to be completely true.