Cambrian explosion

Freshwater animals have been found at 435 million years ago, and were assumed to come later than saltwater ones. But “Come On In, the Water’s Fresh”, cries Sid Perkins at Science (17 May 2011):

Tiny burrows. A dense aggregation of U-shaped fossil burrows in 520-million- to 542-million-year-old rocks pushes back the appearance of freshwater ecosystems at least 85 million years, a new study suggests.Newly discovered fossils left by creatures burrowing in the sediments of an ancient riverbed push back the beginning of freshwater ecosystems by at least 85 million years. The find hints that there was little if any delay between the development of freshwater and marine ecosystems, contrary to what many biologists and paleontologists have proposed.

The theory had been that life started in the oceans and only later moved to fresh water because the latter lacked nutrients from organic substances, needed for life. Read More ›

Or anyway, the latest attempt at it. The Darwin lobby promotes uniformitarianism (long, slow gradual change caused by natural selection acting on random mutation), which is at odds with the evidence of rapid bouts of change followed by long periods of stasis.

Over at Access Research Network, David Tyler discusses “The unscientific hegemony of uniformitarianism” (05/16/11), and new approaches in progress. Read More ›

The Earth as its continents would have been seen from space, starting 500 million years ago just before the Cambrian explosion (courtesy MSNBC Cosmiclog): As he built the visualizations, Mendez said he was struck by the fact that the distribution of land mass among the continents has changed dramatically over the past 750 million years, but the total land area has stayed consistent – between about 10 and 30 percent of total surface area. “I was expecting to see more,” he said.

In the Early Edition of PNAS, there’s an article about the fly’s evolutionary tree. While not having access to the article, the supplemental information is available online.

In the abstract the authors note that:

. . . we use micro-RNAs to resolve a node with implications for the evolution of embryonic development in Diptera. We demonstrate that flies experienced three episodes of rapid radiation—lower Diptera (220 Ma), lower Brachycera (180 Ma), and Schizophora (65 Ma)—and a number of life history transitions to hematophagy, phytophagy, and parasitism in the history of fly evolution over 260 million y.

If you connect to the link below, and then scroll to the last page (p. 8), you’ll see the graph which compares the actual species diversity (clade size) versus the age of the fly grouping, and which includes dark lines indicating the “expected” relationship between “clade size” and “age”. The dark line is at a 45-degree angle, in conformity with the notion of Darwinian gradualism: that is, as organisms slowly evolve (a radiation outward from the major form), they slowly diverge morphologically, one from the other. So, the greater amount of time, the greater amount of diversity in a particular family of flies.

Clade Size vs. Age for Diptera Families pnas Mar 14 2011

But what the graph demonstrates is that the diversification happened suddenly, and over a short period of time.

Read More ›

In this Nature Alert article, we find out that sponges, present as early as 635 million years ago in the fossil record, have 18,000 genes, among which are genes for apoptosis, that is, cell death. Now here is a creature that has “a simple body plan lacking organs, muscles and nerve cells.” Let’s remember that the number of human genes, prior to whole genome analysis, was thought to be at least 100,000. With early genomic results in, this number was revised downward. Today it stands at 25,000—and shrinking! (There are arguments for lowering it still) So the lowly sponge—no nerves, no muscles, simple as you can get—has around 65% the number of genes as humans. Well, all of this presents Read More ›

(Note: These are the key books, not science or media news. The Top Ten Darwin and Design Science News Stories for 2009 are here, and my comments are here, the Top Ten Darwin and Design Media News Stories for 2009 are here, and my comments on the latter are here. Also, to get the links, you must go here.) My comments follow. 2. Darwin’s Dilemma: The Mystery of the Cambrian Fossil Record (DVD). The final film in Illustra Media’s long-planned Intelligent Design trilogy, Darwin’s Dilemma, was released in September 2009 and quickly made headlines when it was barred from public viewing by the California Science Center. The documentary examines what many consider to be the most powerful refutation of Darwinian Read More ›

How well neoDarwinian evolution is established and the universal “consensus” over it is demonstrated by:
Bird-from-Dinosaur Theory of Evolution Challenged: Was It the Other Way Around?

ScienceDaily (Feb. 10, 2010) — A new study just published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences provides yet more evidence that birds did not descend from ground-dwelling theropod dinosaurs, experts say, and continues to challenge decades of accepted theories about the evolution of flight. Read More ›

Apparently round two of the controversy over the California’s Science Center’s cancellation of Darwin’s Dilemma is getting ready to take place. This was reported and discussed here back in October, as well as here and here in December.

Now, a California State Senator is calling the constitutionality of the censorship into question. Read More ›

The late Stephen J. Gould once wrote “Replay the tape [of evolution] a million times from a Burgess [the Burgess Shale fossils]beginning, and I doubt that anything like Homo sapiens would ever evolve again. It is, indeed, a wonderful life.” (Gould, Stephen J. [Professor of Zoology and Geology, Harvard University], “Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History,” [1989], Penguin: London, 1991, reprint, p.289. Well, maybe we wont’ have to replay the tape, because the tape of evolutionary history is getting replayed all the time, in the sense that lately it seems that every new discovery forces a complete re-write (re-wind?) of evolutionary history. Now we have a recent fossil discovery about to be reported in Nature shows that tetrapods may have crawled out of the seas way earlier than previously thought.

According to the article Read More ›

Anika Smith, at the Discovery Institute, informs me that: Those who live in the Los Angeles area are invited to attend a gala premiere screening of Illustra Media’s new documentary, Darwin’s Dilemma: The Mystery of the Cambrian Fossil Record next Sunday, October 25th at 7:00 pm at the University of Southern California. The event is sponsored by the American Freedom Alliance. This premiere was originally scheduled for the California Science Center, but the Center canceled the event just a few days ago, leaving the organizers virtually no time to find a new location. If you live in the Los Angeles area, you can show your support for free speech … That might be a very good idea. Especially if you Read More ›