Does the idea of an “explosion of organisms” reinforce a misleading perspective?
From Evolution News & Views:
The evidence for intelligent design just keeps getting stronger. It’s long been known that the Cambrian explosion isn’t the only explosion of organisms in the fossil record. There’s also something of a fish explosion, an angiosperm explosion, and a mammal explosion. Paleontologists have even cited a “bird explosion,” with major bird groups appearing in a short time period. Frank Gill’s 2007 textbook Ornithology observes the “explosive evolution” of major living bird groups, and a paper in Trends in Ecology and Evolution titled “Evolutionary Explosions and the Phylogenetic Fuse” explains:
A literal reading of the fossil record indicates that the early Cambrian (c. 545 million years ago) and early Tertiary (c. 65 million years ago) were characterized by enormously accelerated periods of morphological evolution marking the appearance of the animal phyla, and modern bird and placental mammal orders, respectively.
Now, a massive genetic study published in Science has confirmed the fossil evidence that birds arose explosively. According to an article titled, “Rapid bird evolution after the age of dinosaurs unprecedented”: More.
Okay, it all happened really fast, and so do explosions. (If it happened really slow, we would call it evolution.)
See the problem? Explosions aren’t just very fast, they are usually destructive. Yes, they can be constructive, but only if controlled for a constructive purpose like blasting a subway tunnel (intelligent design).
What actually happens, whether it’s the origin of the universe or the origin of birds most fits the pattern of a scheduled rollout.
You can often see antecedents, to be sure, as in the dinosaurian traits of birds. But the antecedents do nothing to account for later developments like the “enormously accelerated periods” or “unprecedented” rapidity of constructive change.
Don’t forget, Fred Hoyle called it the Big Bang theory to make fun of it. In doing so, he implanted an idea that fits what we are required to believe, but not what we see. Thoughts?
See: Big Bang exterminator wanted, will train