More on the Burgess Shale.

After my post on the work that is being done on the Burgess Shale, a reader wrote to accuse me of dishonesty in providing the story. I was going to reply within the comments section but the more I thought about it, the more I realized that it probably needs to be a post. This is what the reader wrote:

You didn't tell the whole truth. The Cambrian has starfish, jellyfish, sponges and clams to name a few have not change a bit in 530 million years.

The fact that some of the other species are now extinct is beside the point.

The argument by Creationists is that life sprang into existence! There is nothing that has been found in the pre-Cambrian that can explain the explosion of life in the Cambrian.

Why are Darwinians so dishonest?

Thanks for the article even though it is very misleading.

Dear reader, my point was not to say that there are some forms of life that have remained unchanged. My point was to show that the life in the Cambrian appears over the course of some 30-50 million years. This is not exactly springing into existence. As I mentioned in another post, to put this into perspective, 30-50 million years ago there were no whales, no bears, no modern cats, no modern dogs and no humans. In fact, humans aren't even recognizable 10 million years ago. 30-50 million years in geological terms is a short period. For biological organisms, it is a pile of years. As far as your argument that life "sprang into existence," lets see what Duane Gish has to say:

In the Cambrian geological strata there occurs a sudden, great outburst of fossils of animals on a highly developed level of complexity. In the Cambrian rocks are found billions of fossils of animals so complex that the evolutionists estimate they would have required one and a half billion years to evolve. Trilobites, brachiopods, sponges, corals, jellyfish, in fact every one of the major invertebrate forms of life are found in the Cambrian. What is found in rocks supposedly older than the Cambrian, that is in the so-called pre-Cambrian rocks? Not a single indisputable fossil! Certainly it can be said without fear of contradiction, the evolutionary predecessors of the Cambrian fauna have never been found.

Gish is absolutely incorrect about what is found in the pre-Cambrian rocks. There are extremely well-described fossils, many of which (but not all) can be shown to be ancestral to Cambrian forms. While it is true that Trilobites appear in the early Cambrian, they do not diversify into the nearly 17 000 species they eventually become until late in the Cambrian.

Regarding your comment about nothing being found in pre-Cambrian sediments that can explain the explosion of life in the Cambrian, I found over 1700 articles arguing to the contrary in one pass. Here is what just one, Peterson et al. (2008) has to say about it:

Despite the presence of many different stem-group taxa, the Ediacaran is still a transitional ecology, with these organisms confined to a two-dimensional mat world. This stands in dramatic contrast to the Early Cambrian where the multi-tiered food webs that so typify the Phanerozoic were established with the eumetazoan invasion of both the pelagos and the infaunal benthos (Butterfield 1997, 2001; Vannier & Chen 2000, 2005; Dzik 2005; Peterson et al. 2005; Vannier et al. 2007). Hence, although the Ediacaran is an apparent quantum leap in ecological complexity as compared with the ‘boring billions’ that characterize Earth before the Ediacaran, it is still relatively simple when compared with the Cambrian, yet another quantum leap in organismal and ecological evolution. Thus, the Ediacaran stands as the transition interval between the ‘Precambrian’ and the Phanerozoic.¹

So the question I have to ask is, after reading the article about someone who is out in the field, actually examining the data, how can you accuse him of dishonesty? Furthermore, why would I believe someone who has never actually looked at the data over someone who is intimately involved with it and publishing about it? Now who is being dishonest?


¹Peterson, K.J., Cotton J.A., Gehling, J.G. and Pisani, D. (2008) The Ediacaran emergence of bilaterians: congruence between the genetic and the geological fossil records. Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B 2008 363, 1435-1443

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Acts & Fiction: Werner Arber and the ICR, Again

Lawrence Ford of the ICR has a rebuttal article in this month's Acts & Facts, in which he supports Jerry Bergman's original conclusions in his article of June of 2008 in which he called Nobel Laureate physiologist Werber Arber a "Darwin Skeptic." Arber issued a sharp criticism of the ICR in general and Bergman in particular, following that article. Ford writes:

Our September 2008 issue featured the article "Werner Arber: Nobel Laureate, Darwin Skeptic" by Dr. Jerry Bergman, a frequent contributing author. While not labeling Dr. Arber a creationist, Dr. Bergman demonstrated to readers that this brilliant scientist has included God in his equation when considering the origin of life.

While quite true, that was not the point of Bergman's article in the first place and it sure as all get out wasn't what fueled Arber's response. When asked by Bergman about the origin of life, Arber, in his initial response to Bergman's article, said this:

On solid scientific grounds one cannot expect to discover if a Creator as defined by religious beliefs and sometimes referred to as intelligent design or God's Will, could be responsible for the origin and subsequent evolution of life. Serious scientific investigations can neither prove nor disprove the existence of God or a possible impact of God on evolutionary processes. In our civilization, both scientific knowledge and religious beliefs contribute essentially to our orientating knowledge, but these two sources of our worldview should not be intermingled.

Sounds okay to me. But here's the problem. That wasn't the point of the original article. In the originial article, Bergman stated that Arber was a Darwin skeptic. Arber responded that he was nothing of the sort:

In conclusion, I am neither a "Darwin skeptic" nor an "intelligent design supporter" as it is claimed in Bergman's article. I stand fully behind the NeoDarwinian theory of biological evolution and I contributed to confirm and expand this theory at the molecular level so that it can now be called Molecular Darwinism.

In response to this, the ICR state that:

Dr. Bergman's correspondence with him and review of the original materials supports the conclusions of the Acts & Facts article. Those who rely on macroevolution as the source of life stand on shaky ground because of the obvious design in molecular structures. Creationists, however, have no trouble finding an explanation--life was designed by God.

This is patently false. Dr. Arber's response in no way supported the conclusions of Jerry Bergman's article, which sought to portray Werner Arber as someone who did not accept evolution. Whether or not Dr. Arber believes in God is irrelevant. Further, there was nothing in Dr. Arber's response that indicated that he did not accept macroevolutionary mechanisms. Questions about the origin of life do not encompass evolutionary theory. Of course Dr. Arber would respond by saying he didn't know about the origins of life. That is not part of his research.

More Acts and Fiction from the ICR.