CHAPTER 8. CONFESSIONS REGARDING THE SUDDEN EMERGENCE OF LIFE

CHAPTER 8.
CONFESSIONS REGARDING
THE SUDDEN EMERGENCE OF LIFE

Investigation of the geological strata and the fossil record shows that life on Earth emerged all of a sudden. The deepest stratum in which fossils of living things are encountered is that known as the Cambrian, dating back 520 to 530 million years.

The fossils in Cambrian rocks belong to radically different life forms. What comes as a terrible disappointment to evolutionists is that all of these species emerged suddenly and with no primitive forerunners preceding them.

Most of the life forms in Cambrian strata possess complex systems, such as eyes, gills and blood circulatory systems, and often, advanced physiological features no different from those of creatures living today. This is a sign that all of life was created in a single act, with no common ancestors or evolutionary process being involved.

Darwin warned that if such a possibility were ever proven—that life began suddenly—it would represent a lethal blow to this theory. As can be seen from the evolutionist statements below, the theory of evolution suffers the first of many such blows from the Cambrian fossils, among the earliest forms of life.

Charles Darwin:

If numerous species, belonging to the same genera or families, have really started into life all at once, the fact would be fatal to the theory of descent with slow modification through natural selection. 139

For instance, I cannot doubt that all the Silurian trilobites have descended from some one crustacean, which must have lived long before the Silurian age, and which probably differed greatly from any known animal. . . . Consequently, if my theorybe true, it is indisputable that before the lowest Silurian stratum was deposited, long periods elapsed, as long as, or probably far longer than, the whole interval from the Silurian age to the present day; and that during these vast, yet quite unknown, periods of time, the world swarmed with living creatures. To the question why we do not find records of these vast primordial periods, I can give no satisfactory answer. 140

Niles Eldredge is a paleontologist at Harvard University:

The trilobite pictured to the left is a life form that emerged some 530 million years ago, in the Cambrian Period, and has since become extinct. Trilobites had extraordinarily complex eyes. These, consisting of hundreds of comb-like components and a double-lens structure, are a miracle of creation that leaves evolutionists speechless. The sudden appearance of such a structure in the fossil record is one of the manifest proofs that refute the theory of evolution.

Then there was something of an explosion. Beginning about six hundred million years ago, and continuing for about ten to fifteen million years, the earliest known representatives of the major kinds of animals still populating today’s seas made a rather abrupt appearance. This rather protracted ‘event’ shows up graphically in the rock record: all over the world, at roughly the same time, thick sequences of rocks, barren of any easily detected fossils, are overlain by sediments containing a gorgeous array of shelly invertebrates: trilobites (extinct relatives of crabs and insects), brachiopods, mollusks. Creationists have made much of this sudden development of a rich and varied fossil record where, just before, there was none. Indeed, the sudden appearance of a varied, well-preserved array of fossils, which geologists have used to mark the beginnings of the Cambrian Period (the oldest division of the Paleozoic Era) does pose a fascinating intellectual challenge. 141

Daniel Axelrod is Professor of Geology and Botany at the University of California:

One of the major unsolved problems of geology and evolution is the occurrence of diversified, multi-called marine invertebrates in the lower Cambrian rocks on all the continents and their absence in rocks of greater age. 142

Barbara Jaffe Stahl is an evolutionist paleontology professor and senior faculty member at Saint Anselm College, Manchester:

Finding vertebrate bone in Cambrian rocks, for instance, has proved that the backboned animals are as old as most of the known invertebrates. 143

Richard Monastersky is senior writer at The Chronicle of Higher Education in Washington:

A half-billion years ago, . . . the remarkably complex forms of animals 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. The Chengyiang fauna demonstrates that the large animal phyla of today were present already in the early Cambrian and that they were as distinct from each other as they are today. 144

Snails, sponges, worms, sea anemones, starfish, swimming crustaceans and sea urchins, some of the life forms that suddenly emerged in the Cambrian Period, possess exactly the same perfect structures as their counterparts living today.

The evolutionist Richard Dawkins indoctrinating young students with evolutionary propaganda.

Richard Dawkins is a British zoologist and one of the leading contemporary evolutionists:

For example the Cambrian strata of rocks. . . are the oldest ones in which we find most of the major invertebrate groups. And we find many of them 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. 145

Stephen Jay Gould is Professor of Geology and Paleoanthropology at Harvard University:

Where, then, are all the Precambrian ancestors—or, if they didn’t exist in recognizable form, how did modern complexity get off to such a fast start? 146

The Cambrian explosion was the most remarkable and puzzling event in the history of life. 147

Marshall Kay is a geologist and Professor at Columbia University and Edwin H. Colbert is an authority on paleontology and curator at the American Museum of Natural History:

The introduction of a variety of organisms in the early Cambrian, including such complex forms of the arthropods as the trilobites, is surprising. . . The introduction of abundant organisms in the record would not be so surprising if they were simple.Why should such complex organic forms be in rocks about six hundred million years old and be absent or unrecognized in the records of the preceding two billion years? . . . If there has been evolution of life, the absence of the requisite fossils in the rocks older than the Cambrian is puzzling. 148

139 Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species: A Facsimile of the First Edition, Harvard University Press, 1964, p. 302.
140 Ibid., pp. 313-14.
141 N. Eldredge, The Monkey Business: A Scientist Looks at Creationism (1982), p. 44.
142 D. Axelrod, Science, 128.7, 1958
143 Barbara J. Stahl, Vertebrate History: Problems in Evolution, New York: Dover Publications, 1985, p. vii
144 Richard Monastersky, "Mysteries of the Orient," Discover, April 1993, p. 40
145 Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker, W. W. Norton, London, 1986, p. 229.
146 Stephen Jay Gould, "A Short Way to Big Ends", Natural History, vol. 95 (Jan 1986), p. 18
147 Stephen Jay Gould, "The Evolution of Life on Earth", Scientific American, vol. 271 (October 1994), p. 89
148 Kay, Marshall, and Edwin H. Colbert, Stratigraphy and Life History, 1965, 736 pp. 102-103