Evolution News keeps a lookout for new excuses that pop up to explain away the very un-Darwinian sudden emergence of 17 or more animal body plans in the Cambrian explosion. Ever since Stephen Meyer published Darwin’s Doubt in 2014, we have seen a gamut of excuses pass by. One of the strangest was that it was caused by (or correlated with) one or more “carbon isotope excursions” or CIE (see here, here, and here). Presumably, the major CIE was also associated with more oxygenated ocean water, giving microbes the magic elixir of oxygen to drive them to become animals (see here and here). The dates of those carbon excursions, however, have been uncertain and hard to correlate at different sites around the world.
A new study published in PNAS has tried to nail down the dates of the so-called “Shuram CIE” to see if it correlates with the Ediacaran or Cambrian fossils…
The authors measured isotopes in northwest Canada, Newfoundland, and Oman — three geographically distinct sites on “multiple paleocontinents and paleolatitudes” — to bracket the onset, duration, and ending of the Shuram CIE. Unfortunately, the earliest Ediacaran fossils appeared well before this excursion. This undercuts the notion that the CIE somehow facilitated the explosive appearance of multicellular life. Evolution News, “In Carbon Isotope Excursions, Darwinists Lose Another Excuse for the Cambrian Explosion” at Evolution News and Science Today:
Paper. (paywall)
Somebody should invent software for them, maybe called ExcusePro. They just need to set the app to Cambrian Explosion and AI will come up with thousands of excuses in a split second.l They can just keep peeling them off, as needed.