Modern Marine Ecosystem in Place By Time Trilobite Fossils Appear

 This study made the case that the evolutionary rate of trilobites during the Cambrian wasn't all that extraordinary. Most naturalists look at that and say "See! The Cambrian Explosion wasn't all that explosive after all!" But if they do that they miss the fine print that makes their problem worse, not better. 

"We conclude that the Cambrian explosion was over by the time the typical Cambrian fossil record commences and reject an unfossilized Precambrian history for trilobites, solving a problem that had long troubled biologists since Darwin."

So they "solved a problem" about the Cambrian explosion by......saying the real explosion happened BEFORE the Cambrian trilobite fossils show up. Yet they also reject the idea that there was an unfossilized Precambrian history for trilobites. IOW, the explosion was over by the start of the typical fossil record, and there were none before that (in the Vendian).

"Our data therefore provide robust, quantitative evidence that by the time the typical Cambrian fossil record begins (∼521 Ma), the Cambrian explosion had already largely concluded. This suggests that a modern-style marine biosphere had rapidly emerged during the latest Ediacaran and earliest Cambrian (∼20 million years), followed by broad-scale evolutionary stasis throughout the remainder of the Cambrian."

I was glad they used the term "Cambrian explosion", as many science-deniers, of the naturalistic persuasion, have denied there was a true Cambrian explosion. Indeed the purpose of this study was to show that the Cambrian did not have excessively rapid rates of evolution- after the typical fossils of the period show up. But in so doing they are making what occurred before even more explosive!

They emphasize that trilobites did not have a pre-Cambrian history. Indeed one section of their report is "A Cambrian Origin for Trilobites". So somewhere between 541 million (edit, Wiki says 538.8 mya)  to 521 million years ago is when all of this change took place. By only looking at trilobites they are very much narrowing the scope of their problem because so many other forms show up too, including a host of trilobite-like creatures in addition to many other phyla. The oldest trace fossils of what can be described as euarthropods (a group which includes trilobites) are 537 million years old (last section). In other words, they show up at basically the same time everything else did (the Cambrian started 541 MYA). Indeed it apparently took only 410,000 years, a shockingly brief figure, for the Ediacaran biota to be replaced by Cambrian biota. This is made even more shocking compared to the very minimal evolutionary progress of the Ediacaran fauna. If evolution is universal, why didn't the Edicarans do much of it? The Cambrian biota showed much more diversification in their first eight million years (and likely much less) than their predecessors did in 80-100 million years. 

Saying that evolutionary rates were not much out of the norm for the Cambrian once typical (trilobite) fossils show up only solves the problem for the history of fossilization. It doesn't solve the problem of where this modern marine ecosystem came from, because it seems to be in place from the start, without reasonable ancestor forms. It would be like saying a billion dollars appeared in my bank account from nowhere but this is not unusual at all because after the billion dollars appeared my bank account behaved normally, changing with normal deposits and withdrawals. 

PS- there is an issue that defies naturalistic evolutionary expectations within the Cambrian, even if the overall rate isn't much out of the ordinary. The way things appear is strange. There are very few species per order (or sometimes "superfamily" depending on how they rate it). It is like things happened in the reverse of the description of evolution where a species over time becomes a group of closely related species called a genus. Then over more time one or more of those species gets so different than the rest that it becomes its own new genus. This in effect forms a new family that often contains many genera. Eventually that family may be so different from the original species, or other of its descendants, that it becomes a superfamily, or even a new order. But this isn't what we see in the Cambrian. New Orders show up without a lot of speciation. The leaps between form are bigger, even if there are fewer steps (species) between them. Saying that "speciation didn't occur at a fast rate during the bulk of the Cambrian" doesn't deal with this issue at all.

This study did not address how the evolution "started from the top" and went down rather than the standard bottom-up diversification we hear about. There isn't a lot of speciation going on, yet new types at higher taxonomic levels appear. Indeed simpler and more complex appear at the same time, defying naturalistic paradigms. But this isn't the only time that's happened in earth's history. It happened with tetrapods, it happened with comb-jellies, and it happened in the Ordovician. 

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Two Atheist Scientists Convert to Christianity

 And they were saying some of the same things I have been saying. The one says that "Believing is seeing" to describe they way that people pick a view and then accumulate evidence to support it. The way I have been putting it is "All evidence is a mirror. It says as much about the viewer as the thing studied". We look at the same facts and draw different conclusions and that's why. The difference is not the evidence, its us!

The second fellow said that he studied the mind, and that naturalism can't explain the mind, nor can it explain physics. I've said the same thing myself in my book, and further speculated that as more and more evidence about biology is uncovered the failure of naturalism as an explanation will become more clear in that field as well. 

Read it all here. https://medium.com/top-down-or-bottom-up/two-former-atheist-scientists-explain-how-science-changed-their-minds-cc4535fcadd6

Plants Were Late Bloomers (Plant Evolution)

 11And God said, “Let the earth sprout vegetation, plants^e yielding seed, and fruit trees bearing fruit in which is their seed, each according to its kind, on the earth.” And it was so. 12The earth brought forth vegetation, plants yielding seed according to their own kinds, and trees bearing fruit in which is their seed, each according to its kind."

These two verses in Genesis get the order right as far as the introduction of plants goes. The term "vegetation" is more general and includes things that sprout. I noticed that in scripture the adjective "green" is sometimes put in front of this word, making me wonder if it would not also include some things that we don't strictly regard as vegetation, such as lichens. The seed-bearing plants who bear fruit come last. This checks out with the order we see in nature. 

Plants seem to be late-comers to the earth. The seas were full of living things before the land was full of what we would call plants. Superficially, this would be a serious problem for a concordist view of Genesis chapter one. 

This isn't a problem for the Christ-centered model of early Genesis. Creation is supposed to be slow and awkward and even incapable of doing God's will without God's help. In other words, it is a suitable creation for beings like us! A close look at the text shows that while the filling of the seas and lands with animal life was a job God commanded the lands and seas themselves to do, He participated. They had to have help. In the case of plants, the situation is different. All God did was provide the dry land (itself pointing to the Resurrection) on the third day. He commanded the land to bring forth vegetation and the land did so without any record of God's further intervention. 

Creation wants to do His will, but it does so haltingly and imperfectly. It messes up a lot. Like us. This is why God can give the command to the land to bring forth plants first, but it takes much longer for the earth to pull it off compared to, for example, the seas where God provided more help. It all makes sense, but not under the view of creation that so many churches are teaching. 

I noticed that according to this report, the rise of plants took a while, and there was a modest "burst" followed by a much larger burst recently. That larger burst seems to have been driven by the variety of insects that served as pollinators. In other words, the plants didn't have a big burst until the animals were there as a driver. This is in contrast to the seas, where the biggest burst comes early (Cambrian Explosion) and others follow. This is a pattern that the Christ-centered model, but no other I have seen, would predict. 

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