The Philosophical, Scientific, and Historical Evidence for God

Chapter 13: The Cambrian Explosion
Although Darwin was perplexed by the lack of fossil evidence for his new theory, he still was optimistic that this situation would work itself out over the following decades. As it turns out, he was wrong, as the quotes in the last chapter point out. On the other hand, Darwin still was left with a problem in the fossil record of his time, that really bothered him. There was a period of time in that fossil record, currently referred to as the Cambrian period where a great number of animals suddenly made their appearance. There was no trace of these animals prior to their appearance at this time nor was there any evidence of any transitional animals in the period just prior to their appearance. These fossils were of very complex animals and were found in the sedimentary layers of the geological column. This period of time became known as the Cambrian Explosion. Darwin noted, “The difficulty of understanding the absence of vast piles of fossiliferous strata, which on my theory were no doubt somewhere accumulated before the Silurian [Cambrian] epoch, is very great.”74
Darwin decided to ask the opinion of arguably the most prominent paleontologist in the world at that time, Harvard’s Louis Agassiz. He was hoping that Louis would be able to think of something that would explain how this unusual fossil record was still consistent with macroevolution. However, Agassiz concluded that there was no way that Darwin’s theory of evolution could be true given what was seen in the fossil record… specifically, the evidence from the Cambrian Explosion. This “Explosion” would not have happened if living organisms evolved as Darwin believed they did. That was a major disappointment to Darwin. Of course, Agassiz’s opinion would not bring the curtain down on this new theory. Far too many other scientists had jumped on Darwin’s bandwagon within just a few years after its introduction. Therefore, no one was going to “pull the plug” on this idea even if it had run into some problems. It is worth itemizing the information that came out of analyzing the fossils from the Cambrian era and comparing that information to what Darwin had expected to find.
• The abrupt appearance of animals with complex anatomical designs suddenly appeared in the Cambrian period. This was absolutely not expected to occur as a result of evolution. Instead, there should have been hundreds or thousands of ancestral animals in the fossil record leading up to the animals seen in this Cambrian epoch. The evolutionary mechanism to arrive at a world with complex anatomical animals via random variation with natural selection of ancestral animals would require millions of years.
• Phyla and classes appear right at the start of the Cambrian Explosion. Darwin’s theory would require that only after a very long period of time (millions of years) and a history of divergence from species, genera, then families, and orders, would classes and phyla eventually emerge. This is referred to as a ‘bottom-up’ order of the fossils and was definitely not what was seen in the fossil record.
• Agassiz was quick to point out that only many small changes over millions of years could, theoretically, result in significant changes in animals. He noted that “extreme variations finally degenerate or become sterile, like monstrosities they die out.”75 A frustrated Darwin was still able to be honest about the problem. He wrote, “If my theory is true, it is indisputable that before the lowest [Cambrian] stratum was deposited, long periods elapsed, as long as or probably longer than, the whole interval from the [Cambrian] age to the present day, and that during these vast, yet quite unknown periods of time, the world swarmed with living creatures.”76 The problem was that there was absolutely no evidence that any of these expected transitional animals ever existed.
• The Cambrian Period of time, when all of these animals were making their appearance, took place during a remarkably short period of time (geologically speaking). Experts now believe that all of this activity took place within the period of about 10 million years. During this time, roughly 30 different phyla made their appearance into the world. It is between the phyla that major differences in body architecture is found.
• Further evaluation of the fossils in geological columns during that time period and the Devonian epoch that came after the Cambrian revealed that sudden extinctions were seen to occur. As the epochs continued, many novel animals, such as dinosaurs (Triassic and Jurassic periods) suddenly appeared as other phyla suddenly became extinct. Harvard paleontologist, Stephen Gould, summarized what was actually seen in the fossil record nicely, “The history of life is not a continuum of development, but a record punctuated by brief, sometimes geologically instantaneous, episodes of mass extinctions and subsequent diversification.”77
• “The known fossil record fails to document a single example of phyletic evolution accomplishing a major morphological transition and hence offers no evidence that the gradualistic model can be valid.”78 (Dr. Steven Stanley, paleontologist)

So, Darwin had a serious problem with this theory in that the fossil record was not at all consistent with his theory. Again, he understood this, “The abrupt manner in which whole groups of species suddenly appear in certain formations has been urged by several paleontologists – for instance Agassiz, Pictet, and Sedgwick – as a fatal objection to the belief in the transmutation of the species. If numerous species of 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.”79 Frankly, that is the way things did look in Darwin’s day. Darwin continued to hold onto the hope that the complete fossil record would someday prove his theory right. Unfortunately for Darwin, it has not done so. Even in his day, the great Agassiz recognized that there was a sufficient geological record to prove Darwin’s theory wrong, “However broken the geological record may be, there is a complete sequence in many parts of it, from which the character of the succession may be ascertained. Since the most exquisitely delicate structures, as well as embryonic phases of growth of the most perishable nature, have been preserved from very early deposits, we have no right to infer the disappearance of types because their absence disproves some favorite [i.e., Darwinian] theory.”80 In other words, even in Darwin’s time, there already was plenty of fossil evidence to realize that there never were any transitional forms of animals to find… they never existed.