Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community

The cancer theory of the Cambrian explosion of life 541 million years ago

Share
Facebook
Twitter
LinkedIn
Flipboard
Print
Email
BurgessShale trilobite/Smith609, CC

No really. From Evolution News:

You thought you’d heard it all? All the desperate materialist theories seeking to explain the burst of biological novelty some 530 million years ago that Meyer writes about in Darwin’s Doubt? You were wrong. Along comes Lund University in Sweden with a “Novel hypothesis on why animals diversified on Earth.” Get ready for the cancer theory of the Cambrian explosion.

Can tumors teach us about animal evolution on Earth? Researchers believe so and now present a novel hypothesis of why animal diversity increased dramatically on Earth about half a billion years ago. A biological innovation may have been key. [Emphasis added.]

Not many of us who have seen friends suffer or die from cancer would sanctify tumors as “biological innovations” leading to anything good.

The new hypothesis holds that the dramatic diversification of animals resulted from a revolution within the animals’ own biology, rather than in the surrounding chemistry on Earth’s surface.

This will be a hard sell, but charitably, let’s give them their slot on the Cambrian Gong Show and try to understand their act. It’s good to see they toss out the oxygen theory, the runner-up for worst explanation. Agreed, “a causal relationship between the Cambrian explosion and increasing atmospheric oxygen lacks convincing evidence.” More.

It actually doesn’t matter what the explanation is as long as they keep churning out new explanations.

See also: Complex worm find from Cambrian (541-485 mya) “helps rewrite” our understanding of annelid head evolution

Comments
It is slightly different. Evolving cancer cells are reflecting the frontloaded evolutionary process as described by Schindewolf, Goldschmid and other preformationists. This proces, known as chromotrypsis, is an process which causes instant evolutionary change due to position effects. Of course, chromothripsis does not add novel Information, just puts it in another context so that (de)repression of programs can take place. It is an epigenetic mechanism, which generates Variation, not novelties.Peer
February 13, 2018
February
02
Feb
13
13
2018
06:47 AM
6
06
47
AM
PDT

Leave a Reply