According to Darwin Himself, the Cambrian Explosion Deals His Theory a Deadly Blow

As Stephen Jay Gould says:

The fossil record had caused Darwin more grief than joy. Nothing distressed him more than the Cambrian explosion, the coincident appearance of almost all complex organic designs....162

In Darwin’s time, the Cambrian explosion was a newly discovered fact. For a biologist who claimed that organisms emerged by chance in slow stages, this phenomenon was unexpected and surprising. Darwin admitted this severe difficulty in his book The Origin of Species:

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.163

Elsewhere, Darwin openly admitted that he was unable to come up with an explanation appropriate to his theory:

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.164

Under normal circumstances, one would expect such a great fact to consign the theory of evolution to the shelf and to silence its supporters. Yet that is not what happened. Darwin hoped that in the future, an explanation would be provided for this extraordinary variety of life that emerged in the Cambrian. Yet he did recognize that if no explanation were forthcoming—in other words, if the fossil record failed to produce the expected intermediate forms—this would be a lethal blow for his theory:

The abrupt manner in which whole groups of species suddenly appear in certain formations, has been urged by several paleontologists—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 [emphasis added].165

This admission of Darwin’s expresses in his own words the persistent flaw in the theory of evolution. No examples of the intermediate forms have turned up that Darwin expected would be found in the future. It is increasingly obvious that the countless numbers of species began life immediately, with no foregoing process of evolution. The fact that 50 separate phyla existed all together in an era when there should have been only single-celled organisms, is sufficient to constitute that coup de grâce..