An A to Z of Creationist Fallacies: C is for Cambrian Explosion

The Cambrian Explosion was a sudden upsurge in evolution, when previously simple lifeforms suddenly diversified into multifarious and complex species in a relatively short timeframe – keep in mind I am saying “relatively short” here, because it will become very important later. Charles Darwin first wrote of the Cambrian Explosion in 1859, and when he did so, it was indeed a problem that such diverse species should be found in the same timescale. Needless to say, the creationists jumped on this immediately, claiming it was proof of “rapid” creation of life, have done so ever since, still do, and frankly make asses of themselves in the process. My only surprise is that creationists don't think the term “Cambrian Explosion” mean a violent event, with animals blowing all over the place from the blast, in the same way that they continually assert that the 'Big Bang' was a violent explosion.

Okay, let's look at a that relatively short timeframe. The Cambrian Era, and the fossils which come from it – that is the ones which creationists claim show “rapid” creation – in fact began around 545 million years ago, and lasted to until approximately 465 million years ago, giving an 80 million year timescale in which this “explosion” took place. Now, 80 million years is indeed a very long time, but when you are dealing with a 3.8 billion year evolution, it is indeed relatively short. Consider that the genus Homo from which we come evolved 2.8 million years ago, while our own species, Homo Sapiens Sapiens, is a true Johnny-Come-Lately to this planet, appearing a mere 200,000 years ago. We therefore see that this 'sudden' explosion of lifeforms creationists claim is in fact long enough for civilizations to have risen from the first appearance of the species to mankind's current level some 400 times.

Nonetheless, because it is so long, and because of creationist falsehoods, many palaeontologists are now discarding the term “Explosion” and are instead referring to the period as the “Cambrian Radiation” (no creationists, this has nothing to do with nuclear radiation), “Cambrian Slow Fuse” or the “Cambrian Diversification”. And it is no wonder they are doing so, as some of the creationist claims are ignorant to the point of embarrassment, but nonetheless, they keep getting repeated, and some less well educated and uninformed (and deluded) people are taking their claims as verbatim.

In 2013, Dr Stephen C Meyer PhD, a senior fellow of the pro-creationist Discovery Institute, published his work on the Cambrian Explosion, Darwin's Doubt; The Explosive Origin of Animal Life and the Case for Intelligent Design. Asserting that the Cambrian event proves a rapid creation, Meyer in one interview stated “The Cambrian Explosion refers to the geologically sudden or abrupt appearance of the major group of animals early in the fossil record, in a period of time that geologists call the Cambrian.” Notice the language here; “geologically sudden or abrupt”. In a book which deals mainly with palaeontology, Meyer, whose PhD is in Philosophy of Science, is writing on a subject he has absolutely no expertise or academic qualifications in. Sure, neither do I, just as I lack knowledge or qualifications in many things. The difference is I don't go about writing books in which I let my heart rule my head, and come out with farcical assertions.

Meyer's book drew a lot of flak from the scientific community, not least a scathing review from Donald Prothero, who is a palaeontologist;

"His figures (e.g., Figs. 2.5, 2.6, 3.8) portray the “explosion” as if it happened all at once, showing that he has paid no attention to the past 70 years of discoveries. He dismisses the Ediacara fauna as not clearly related to living phyla (a point that is still debated among palaeontologists), but its very existence is fatal to the creationist falsehood that multicellular animals appeared all at once in the fossil record with no predecessors. Even more damning, Meyer completely ignores the existence of the first two stages of the Cambrian (nowhere are they even mentioned in the book, or the index) and talks about the Atdabanian stage as if it were the entire Cambrian all by itself. His misleading figures (e.g., Fig. 2.5, 2.6, 3.8) imply that there were no modern phyla in existence until the trilobites diversified in the Atdabanian. Sorry, but that’s a flat out lie. Even a casual glance at any modern diagram of life’s diversification (Figure 1) demonstrates that probable arthropods, cnidarians, and echinoderms are present in the Ediacara fauna, molluscs and sponges are well documented from the Nemakit-Daldynian Stage, and brachiopods and archaeocyathids appear in the Tommotian Stage–all millions of years before Meyer’s incorrectly defined “Cambrian explosion” in the Atdabanian. The phyla that he lists in Fig. 2.6 as “explosively” appearing in the Atdabanian stages all actually appeared much earlier–or they are soft-bodied phyla from the Chinese Chengjiang fauna, whose first appearance artificially inflates the count. Meyer deliberately and dishonestly distorts the story by implying that these soft-bodied animals appeared all at once, when he knows that this is an artifact of preservation. It’s just an accident that there are no extraordinary soft-bodied faunas preserved before Chengjiang, so we simply have no fossils demonstrating their true first appearance, which occurred much earlier based on molecular evidence."

Prothero continues;

"Meyer’s distorted and false view of conflating the entire Early Cambrian (545-520 m.y. ago) as consisting of only the third stage of the Early Cambrian (Atdabanian, 530-525 m.y. ago) creates a fundamental lie that falsifies everything else he says in the ensuing chapters. He even attacks me (p. 73) by claiming that during our 2009 debate, it was I who was improperly redefining the Cambrian! Even a cursory glance at any recent palaeontology book on the topic, or even the Wikipedia site for “Cambrian explosion”, shows that it is Meyer who has cherry-picked and distorted the record, completely ignoring the 15 million years of the first two stages of the Cambrian because their existence shoots down his entire false interpretation of the fossil record. Sorry, Steve, but you don’t get to contradict every palaeontologist in the world, ignore the evidence from the first two stages of the Cambrian, and redefine the Early Cambrian as the just the Atdabanian Stage just to fit your fairy tale!"

We therefore see a very common problem with creationists when discussing or writing about the Cambrian Explosion, as with just about everything else they say or write; they are willing to misrepresent and outright lie when they think the ends justify the means. These are the same people who are all too willing to play the unco righteous, to tell you that we are all sinners and deserve eternal torment in Hell, that smugly boast that they are 'saved by the Grace of God' – and yet who will quite readily blaspheme their own faith by breaking the Ninth Commandment: Thou shalt not bear false witness.

Some go even further and come out with utter and complete nonsense. Creationist preacher Jack Wellman, writing in the website What Christians Want to Know, states the following;

“The reason that scientists, archaeologists and palaeontologists call the Cambrian Explosion an “explosion” is because most of the present species that exist today or have ever existed are found in what is known as the Cambrian layer or explosion.”

Science of course says absolutely no such thing about the Cambrian Explosion. What we do know is that the phyla created in the Cambrian Explosion are with us to this day. Whassat? I hear you say. Phyla is the plural form of phylum, which is one step below kingdoms in taxonomic terms of defining lifeforms. Okay, I can sense some people's eyes glazing over. We humans are of the animal kingdom, and as vertebrates, we are of the phylum chordata. For Wellman therefore to try to stretch phyla out to species is unintelligent and dishonest in the extreme. If anyone were to accept Wellman’s claims, you may as well say “I am a penguin.”

Whilst the phyla survived, quite the opposite of species surviving in fact happened. The overwhelming majority of creatures found in the fossil record of the Cambrian Era died in a mass extinction event, one of many whic occurred down throughout prehistory. Take note the Cambrian event not only record an explosion of life, but also an explosion of death.

In among the Cambrian fossils we find no humans, no horses, no sharks, no penguins, no dogs (I have to include dogs because creationists have a weird fascination with them). We will however find trilobites, opabinias, morellas and other species which are now long, long extinct. And of those few which were lucky enough to survive, they adapted to the new environments they found themselves in; they evolved. The Cambrian Explosion does not deny evolution – it absolutely proves it.

But were that not painful enough, Wellman continues with his frankly deluded ranting;

“The Cambrian Explosion is a sudden appearance of all life as we know it. There are exceedingly few that come before this and those that follow the Cambrian show no differences than their ancestral cousins or predecessors that follow. It is like an explosion of life that appears almost instantaneously on earth. What is amazing about the Cambrian layer is what is not there before it and after it. In other words, you will find almost no predecessors or ancestors of the Cambrian creatures; that is, absolutely nothing above or below this layer.”

Oh my giddy aunt. Those are out and out lies. Certainly, Precambrian fossils are very hard to find due to the fact that rocks from that period have metamorphosed from their original state, while others have been destroyed or remain deeply buried beneath the strata of Phanerozoic eon of some 542 million years ago, and what little fossils have been found are of little use. However, the state of them and the few there are is of absolutely no significance here, for the simple fact that they do indeed exist, and that they do exist completely destroys the creationist argument. Moreover this would be true if science had but only one solitary partial Precambrian fossil. If anything came before the Cambrian Era, then there goes the wild claims of Jack Wellman completely out the window. And of course, as for what lies above the Cambrian layer, no Jack, we have “absolutely nothing” - except for the hundreds of thousands of transitional fossils which trace life over the next 540 million years.

So, that's all very well, but the question still remains, how come for over two thirds of life on planet Earth, it was very simple lifeforms, then WHAM! - in 80 million years, a drop in the ocean of time, extremely complex life was all over the planet? There are a number of hypotheses which may have allowed diversity, and which may have worked in concert with each other. These include the accumulation of sufficient oxygen to allow diversification to occur, the appearance of “toolkit genes” such as the Hox gene allowing complex body plans, the eradication of earlier species allowing a niche in which new lifeforms could rise, and many others.

One fascinating hypothesis has been put forward by geologists Robert Gaines and Shanan Peters. One may wonder why geologists should be speaking on palaeontology, but their ideas are worth consideration and quite brilliant in their simplicity. In the geological record there is a huge gap of missing rock, known as “the great unconformity”. This lost rock represents around 1 billion years of the geological timescale, and Gaines and Peters postulate that as the crystalline rock weathered away, it filled the ocean with minerals such as calcium, magnesium, silicon dioxide, phosphates, and bicarbonates. Over time the accumulation of these minerals allowed already primitive bottom-feeding lifeforms to cross the threshold of biomineralisation; enabling them to evolve hard elements such as shells, exoskeletons, bones and teeth, and viola – the gateway to the animal kingdom was opened.

I have read creationists trying to rubbish this idea, calling it arrant fantasy and even asking why we should listen to geologists when we won't listen to creationists and intelligent design proponents. Well, if the creationists are going to refute the Gaines & Peters hypothesis, then they must by equal measure deny basic dietary facts, such as we all need minerals to survive, and that some of them such as calcium, help to build strong teeth and bones. Science does not listen to creationists and ID proponents because a, their fields are not science, no matter how much they try to claim it is, and b, unlike the other sciences, they bring nothing of value to the table. This is but one more beautiful thing about evolutionary biology; many other sciences confirm and support it, and it in turn confirms and supports many other sciences.

With the Precambrian record being so poor, and the hypotheses of why life suddenly appeared, I fully expect the creationists to rubbish all the above, keep their blinkers on to the fact that their “sudden” explosion of lifeforms was in fact some 80 million years, and continue to claim that it 'proves' creation, some 6000 years ago, brought about all species we know today.

Well, why they continue to close their eyes, put fingers in their ears and shout “LALALALALALA! I'M NOT LISTENING!”, I'll leave them with this somewhat irritating little fact about the Cambrian Explosion which upsets the whole creationist applecart; not only are there no modern animal fossils from the period, but today we tend not to find human beings with gills, horses with flippers, and dogs with fins. You see, in the Cambrian Era, there were as yet no land animals, and each and every one of the fossils is of aquatic creatures.

Waving or drowning, creationists? Waving or drowning?