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Some evolutionists were quick to see the invalidity of Darwin’s claim of fossils as yet undiscovered in pre-Cambrian strata. They had to admit that nothing could be achieved by means of the natural selection that Darwin had proposed as evolution’s fundamental mechanism. However, this meant that evolutionists had to explain, using their own assumptions, the origins of Cambrian life forms that fundamentally refuted evolution. Therefore, they came up with another claim, based on no evidence but on a complete lack thereof.
This theory accepted the hopeless nature of the gradual evolution model that Darwin had put forward, and proposed an alternative to it—neo-Darwinism, otherwise known as the modern evolutionary synthesis.
In 1941, a group of scientists at a meeting organized by the Geological Society of America sought a way to reconcile Darwinian logic with genetic science. The result of lengthy debates among geneticists like G. Ledyard Stebbins and Theodosius Dobzhansky, zoologists like Ernst Mayr and Julian Huxley, and paleontologists like George Gaylord Simpson and Glen L. Jepsen was to use the concept of mutation, proposed by the Dutch botanist Hugo de Vries at the beginning of the century, against the genetic stability revealed by genetic laws.
Mutations are defects occurring in the hereditary mechanisms of living things due to such external influences as radiation.
The scientists gathered at the Geological Society of America gave the answer, “Random mutations,” to the question, “What is the origin of the beneficial changes that develop in living things?”—which question Darwin had attempted to answer on the basis of Lamarck.
The point that these evolutionist scientists either ignored or preferred to ignore was this: It is true that mutations alter organisms’ genetic information, but this change was always a negative one. Mutations do not develop new organs or structures, as evolutionists claim, but typically harm pre-existing tissues. There was no evidence of any benefit produced by a mutation, for which reason all the speculation on mutations’ evolutionary or developmental effect was false. Mutations are usually harmful, and occasionally only neutral events, and this fact by itself is sufficient to invalidate the fictitious mechanisms of evolution as a whole.
However, this fact did not stop neo-Darwinists. They proposed a scenario in which life developed into the extraordinary complexity we see and know today, and assumed its present perfect appearance by way of random mutations, that were generally beneficial, and all from an original single cell. They hid behind this explanation, saying that Cambrian life forms, which they had for long been unable to account for and which totally demolished the theory of evolution, had developed by undergoing an infinite number of mutations.
First of all, the lengths of time regarded as necessary for the mechanisms employed by the neo-Darwinists to account for the origin of species are very long. Neo-Darwinism maintains that small changes have accumulated in the gene sequences of organisms as the result of random mutations, and that after generations, these accumulated changes eventually led to entirely new species. But as we’ve seen, the fact that mutations do not improve an organism’s genetic information invalidates this claim right from the start.
However, even if for the sake of argument we accept the entirely speculative claim that mutations could have an evolutionary effect, evolutionists are still in a hopeless position in the face of the Cambrian explosion. It is totally impossible for the life forms that appeared in the Cambrian to have developed through such minute incremental changes in such a short time. This illogical claim, devoid of any evidence, does nothing for the supposed evolution of the variety of incomparable species that appeared in the Cambrian.
Yet moreover, the modern synthesis’ own claim that organisms evolved into complex life forms by always adding positive new features invalidates the theory itself. The Neo-Darwinist scenario was dreamed up on the basis of the idea that mutations can be beneficial. The science of genetics, however, has never observed a mutation turning one organism into another with largely different but still flawless characteristics. In fact, there is not even a single example of a mutation benefiting or developing any single cell. For that reason, the theory is based on no grounds whatsoever, and the invalidity of the theory has eliminated its claim regarding Cambrian life forms.