CEG\'er
Joined: Jul 2000
Posts: 443 |
Originally posted by JEDsContour:
Cjbaldw, it is frankly just painful to argue about â??yourâ? points. Just so people reading this know, the arguments espoused by cjbaldw came directly from the religious site â??Answers in Genesis.â? Damn near verbatim for the most part. Of course these anti-evolution arguments have been repeated multiple times by religious right organizations so it is hard to say exactly where he read them. The intent of these arguments is NOT to encourage an honest debate about evolution â??? the intent is simply to confuse the layperson.
Actually, you are incorrect, and thanks for making erroneous assumptions yet again. My arguments come from a combination of my own research, the most recent of which was to read "Darwin on Trial" 2nd edition published by Phillip Johnson. To be specific, Johnson is NOT a creationist, though he is oftentimes associated with intelligent design by the religious community for their own purposes. If you read his materials, he consistently takes no personal position on the science/religion argument. As far as the "Answers in Genesis" religious site, never been there.
My intent is NOT to confuse, it is to bring up the legitimate fact that there is little empirical evidence on multiple levels to substantiate evolutionary theory, and I brought up one example via the Cambrian explosion and surrounding periods of time.
Since you posted the material, I'll use it:
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Why are there no transitional fossils in the Cambrian fossil record? Well actually there are. As an example, there are lobopods (basically worms with legs) which are intermediate between arthropods and worms <-- note this is assumed - there is no empirical evidence to support this intermediate relationship.
So what happened? Why did squishy multi cell lumps suddenly start sprouting legs and sense organs? Why is the diversification so suddenly evident?
Well there are many good reasons:
â?¢ The evolution of active predators in the late Precambrian likely spurred the coevolution of hard parts on other animals. These hard parts fossilize much more easily than the previous soft-bodied animals, leading to many more fossils but not necessarily more animals.
â?¢ Early complex animals may have been nearly microscopic. Apparent fossil animals smaller than 0.2 mm have been found in the Doushantuo Formation, China, forty to fifty-five million years before the Cambrian. Much of the early evolution could have simply been too small to see.
â?¢ The earth was just coming out of a global ice age at the beginning of the Cambrian. A "snowball earth" before the Cambrian explosion may have hindered development of complexity or kept populations down so that fossils would be too rare to expect to find today. The more favorable environment after the snowball earth would have opened new niches for life to evolve into.
â?¢ Hox genes, which control much of an animal's basic body plan, were likely first evolving around that time. Development of these genes might have just then allowed the raw materials for body plans to diversify.
â?¢ Atmospheric oxygen may have increased at the start of the Cambrian.
â?¢ Planktonic grazers began producing fecal pellets that fell to the bottom of the ocean rapidly, profoundly changing the ocean state, especially its oxygenation.
â?¢ Unusual amounts of phosphate were deposited in shallow seas at the start of the Cambrian.
All of these factors encouraged rapid evolution.
Note that every single one of these bullet points is basically a wild guess. You might consider it an educated wild guess, but that is FAR from empirical scientific evidence. It is pure assumption specifically geared toward supporting evolutionary theory.
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How any of this is a challenge to evolution, much less the major challenge is beyond me. I think that creationists just like to say â??Cambrian Explosion crisisâ? because it makes them sound knowledgeable.
The issue is not evolution versus creation. The issue is design versus accident if you're going to look at it in these terms. We are to believe that mindless, purposeless variation and selection ultimately resulted in the myriad forms of complex life that exist today.
The theory of evolution requires two basic elements: variation and selection. Darwin was greatly baffled as to how variation could arise, and his theory was rejected in many scientific quarters until a much greater understanding of genetics, and ultimately of the chemical basis of genetics, was achieved. There still is no satisfactory detailed mechanism for producing large enough, non-lethal variation of the DNA to produce a new species in a single jump, and it remains an act of faith on the part of evolutionists that there is some way for it to have happened bit by bit. Again, there is no empirical evidence for evolutionary theory in this respect.
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Studying the Cambrian is basically an exciting and rewarding activity for evolutionary biologists with much left to discover about this fascinating time. Not a crisis for the theory of evolution though.
Considering many of the single and multicellular complex phyla came into existence during the Cambrian explosion (though not entirely as is mentioned), and from the laundry list you provided above as only one example of the current state of guesswork on the part of evolutionary theory, I'd say it's much more than a rewarding activity, it is critically important to evolutionary theory since it deals with the origins of life.
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