Reading time: ~3 min read
One section at the beginning of the documentary "Evolution –The Great Transformations" is devoted to the Cambrian Period. This is when organisms with complex physical structures are first encountered in the fossil record. The most basic categories of living things are known as "phyla." And it is most interesting that just about all the phyla now living should have emerged in the Cambrian Period. Before that time, there were only a few phyla, whereas the fossil record shows the number of phyla emerging during the Cambrian to be around 100. This enormous leap in the variety of living things at that time is so impressive that it has been given the name "Cambrian Explosion" in the scientific literature. The Cambrian Explosion represents one of the most serious dilemmas facing the theory of evolution. The National Geographic TV channel is reluctant to make the facts regarding that period clear, offering an obscure account instead.
The facts concealed by National Geographic TV are expressed by the well-known evolutionist Richard Monastersky in these terms:
A half-billion years ago, . . . the remarkably complex forms of animals that we see today suddenly appeared. This moment, right at the start of Earth's Cambrian Period, some 550 million years ago, marks the evolutionary explosion that filled the seas with the world's first complex creatures.2
Jan Bergström, a paleontologist who studied the early Cambrian deposits also says:
The large animal phyla of today were present already in the early Cambrian and they were as distinct from each other then as they are today.3
No similar organism which evolutionists might be able to put forward as the "ancestor" of the living things which emerged in the Cambrian Explosion exists. The creatures of the Cambrian Explosion came into being instantaneously, with all their features perfectly formed. This, of course, indicates that creation lies at the root of the Cambrian Explosion.
Another aspect of the Cambrian Period explosion, which undermines evolution, is that there are considerably fewer phyla today than there were during the Cambrian. According to the theory of evolution, there should have been an increase over time in the number of categories of living things. Yet, the fossil record demonstrates the exact opposite. The number of phyla existing today is less than half the number that emerged during the Cambrian; the others have gradually become extinct.
One of the most important critics of Darwinism in the world today is the University of California Berkeley professor Phillip E. Johnson, who openly reveals the contradiction between these facts and Darwinism:
Darwinian theory predicts a "cone of increasing diversity," as the first living organism, or first animal species, gradually and continually diversified to create the higher levels of taxonomic order. The animal fossil record more resembles such a cone turned upside down, with the phyla present at the start and thereafter decreasing.4
There can be only one reason for the indirect way this is dealt with in the documentary screened by National Geographic: This explosion shows that life on Earth did not come about by chance, but emerged suddenly and perfectly formed—in other words, that it was created.
References
- Richard Monastersky, "Mysteries of the Orient," Discover, April 1993, p. 40. ↩
- Richard Monastersky, "Mysteries of the Orient," Discover, April 1993, p. 40. ↩
- Phillip E. Johnson, "Darwinism's Rules of Reasoning," Darwinism: Science or Philosophy by Buell Hearn, Foundation for Thought and Ethics, 1994, p.12 ↩