Simon: Last post on this topic for the week! Hope all have enjoyed this information!
"""""Missing Trunk
The evolutionary tree has no trunk. In the earliest part of the fossil record (generally the lowest sedimentary layers of Cambrian rock), life appears suddenly, full-blown, complex, diversified,a and dispersed——worldwide.b Few people realize that many more phyla are found in the Cambrian than exist today.c Complex species, such as fish,d worms, corals, trilobites, jellyfish,e sponges, mollusks, and brachiopods appear suddenly, with no sign anywhere on earth of gradual development from simpler forms. These layers contain representatives of all today’’s plant and animal phyla, including flowering plants,f vascular plants,g and vertebrates (animals with backbones).h Insects, a class comprising four-fifths of all known animals (living and extinct), have no evolutionary ancestors.i The fossil record does not support evolution.j
a . ““There is another and allied difficulty, which is much more serious. I allude to the manner in which species belonging to several of the main divisions of the animal kingdom suddenly appear in the lowest known fossiliferous rocks.”” Darwin, The Origin of Species, p. 348.
““The abrupt manner in which whole groups of species suddenly appear in certain formations, has been urged by several palaeontologists——for instance, by Agassiz, Pictet, and Sedgwick——as a fatal objection to the belief in the transmutation of species. If numerous species, belonging to the same genera or families, have really started into life at once, the fact would be fatal to the theory of evolution through natural selection.”” Ibid., p. 344.
““To the question why we do not find rich fossiliferous deposits belonging to these assumed earliest periods prior to the Cambrian system, I can give no satisfactory answer.”” Ibid., p. 350.
““The case at present must remain inexplicable, and may be truly urged as a valid argument against the views here entertained.”” Ibid., p. 351.
““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 Jay 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 & Company, 1987), p. 229.
Richard Monastersky, ““Mysteries of the Orient,”” Discover, April 1993, pp. 38––48.
““One of the major unsolved problems of geology and evolution is the occurrence of diversified, multicellular marine invertebrates in Lower Cambrian rocks on all the continents and their absence in rocks of greater age.”” Daniel I. Axelrod, ““Early Cambrian Marine Fauna,”” Science, Vol. 128, 4 July 1958, p. 7.
““Evolutionary biology’’s deepest paradox concerns this strange discontinuity. Why haven’’t new animal body plans continued to crawl out of the evolutionary cauldron during the past hundreds of millions of years? Why are the ancient body plans so stable?”” Jeffrey S. Levinton, ““The Big Bang of Animal Evolution,”” Scientific American, Vol. 267, November 1992, p. 84.
““Granted an evolutionary origin of the main groups of animals, and not an act of special creation, the absence of any record whatsoever of a single member of any of the phyla in the Pre-Cambrian rocks remains as inexplicable on orthodox grounds as it was to Darwin.”” T. Neville George (Professor of Geology at the University of Glasgow), ““Fossils in Evolutionary Perspective,”” Science Progress, Vol. 48, No. 189, January 1960, p. 5.
b . Strange Cambrian fossils, thought to exist only in the Burgess Shale of western Canada, have recently been discovered in southern China. See:
L. Ramskööld and Hou Xianguang, ““New Early Cambrian Animal and Onychophoran Affinities of Enigmatic Metazoans,”” Nature, Vol. 351, 16 May 1991, pp. 225––228.
Jun-yuan Chen et al., ““Evidence for Monophyly and Arthropod Affinity of Cambrian Giant Predators,”” Science, Vol. 264, 27 May 1994, pp. 1304––1308.
Evolving so many unusual animals during a geologic period is mind-boggling. But doing it twice in widely separated locations stretches credulity to the breaking point. According to the theory of plate tectonics, China and Canada were even farther apart during the Cambrian.
c . ““A simple way of putting it is that currently we have about 38 phyla of different groups of animals, but the total number of phyla discovered during that period of time [Cambrian] (including those in China, Canada, and elsewhere) adds up to over 50 phyla. That means [there are] more phyla in the very, very beginning, where we found the first fossils [of animal life], than exist now.
““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 Department, University of San Francisco), ““Explosion of Life,”” www.origins.org/real/ri9701/chien.html, p. 2. Interviewed 30 June 1997.
““It was puzzling for a while because they [evolutionary paleontologists] refused to see that in the beginning there could be more complexity than we have now. What they are seeing are phyla that do not exist now——that’’s more than 50 phyla compared to the 38 we have now.”” Ibid., p. 3.
d . ““But whatever ideas authorities may have on the subject, the lung-fishes, like every other major group of fishes that I know, have their origins firmly based in nothing, a matter of hot dispute among the experts, each of whom is firmly convinced that everyone else is wrong ... I have often thought of how little I should like to have to prove organic evolution in a court of law.”” [emphasis in original] Errol White, ““A Little on Lung-Fishes,”” Proceedings of the Linnean Society of London, Vol. 177, Presidential Address, January 1966, p. 8.
““The geological record has so far provided no evidence as to the origin of the fishes ...”” J. R. Norman, A History of Fishes, 3rd edition (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1975), p. 343.
““All three subdivisions of the bony fishes first appear in the fossil record at approximately the same time. They are already widely divergent morphologically, and they are heavily armored. How did they originate? What allowed them to diverge so widely? How did they all come to have heavy armor? And why is there no trace of earlier, intermediate forms?”” Gerald T. Todd, ““Evolution of the Lung and the Origin of Bony Fishes——A Causal Relationship?”” American Zoologist, Vol. 20, No. 4, 1980, p. 757.
e . Cloud and Glaessner, pp. 783––792.
f . A. K. Ghosh and A. Bose, ““Occurrence of Microflora in the Salt Pseudomorph Beds, Salt Range, Punjab,”” Nature, Vol. 160, 6 December 1947, pp. 796––797.
A. K. Ghosh, J. Sen, and A. Bose, ““Evidence Bearing on the Age of the Saline Series in the Salt Range of the Punjab,”” Geological Magazine, Vol. 88, March––April 1951, pp. 129––133.
J. Coates et al., ““Age of the Saline Series in the Punjab Salt Range,”” Nature, Vol. 155, 3 March 1945, pp. 266––267.
““... it is well known that the fossil record tells us nothing about the evolution of flowering plants.”” Corner, p. 100.
Clifford Burdick, in his doctoral research at the University of Arizona in 1964, made discoveries similar to those cited in the four preceding references. [See Clifford Burdick, ““Microflora of the Grand Canyon,”” Creation Research Society Quarterly, Vol. 3, May 1966, pp. 38––50.]
g . S. Leclercq, ““Evidence of Vascular Plants in the Cambrian,”” Evolution, Vol. 10, No. 2, June 1956, pp. 109––114.h . John E. Repetski, ““A Fish from the Upper Cambrian of North America,”” Science, Vol. 200, 5 May 1978, pp. 529––531.
““Vertebrates and their progenitors, according to the new studies, evolved in the Cambrian, earlier than paleontologists have traditionally assumed.”” Richard Monastersky, ““Vertebrate Origins: The Fossils Speak Up,”” Science News, Vol. 149, 3 February 1996, p. 75.
““Also, the animal explosion caught people’’s attention when the Chinese confirmed they found a genus now called Yunnanzoon that was present in the very beginning. This genus is considered a chordate, and the phylum Chordata includes fish, mammals and man. An evolutionist would say the ancestor of humans was present then. Looked at more objectively, you could say the most complex animal group, the chordates, were represented at the beginning, and they did not go through a slow gradual evolution to become a chordate.”” Chien, p. 3.
““At 530 million years, the 3-centimeter-long Haikouichthys appears to be the world’’s oldest fish, while another new specimen, Myllokunmingia, has simpler gills and is more primitive. To Conway Morris and others, the presence of these jawless fish in the Early Cambrian suggests that the origin of chordates lies even farther back in time.”” Erik Stokstad, ““Exquisite Chinese Fossils Add New Pages to Book of Life,”” Science, Vol. 291, 12 January 2001, p. 233.
i . ““There are no fossils known that show what the primitive ancestral insects looked like, ... Until fossils of these ancestors are discovered, however, the early history of the insects can only be inferred.”” Peter Farb, The Insects, Life Nature Library (New York: Time Incorporated, 1962), pp. 14––15.
““There is, however, no fossil evidence bearing on the question of insect origin; the oldest insects known show no transition to other arthropods.”” Frank M. Carpenter, ““Fossil Insects,”” Insects (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1952), p. 18.
j . ““If there has been evolution of life, the absence of the requisite fossils in the rocks older than the Cambrian is puzzling.”” Marshall Kay and Edwin H. Colbert, Stratigraphy and Life History (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1965), p. 103.""""""""