The Case for a Creator - Lee Strobel [129]
I leaned back in my chair and crossed my legs to get comfortable. “This sounds fascinating,” I said. “Explain what you mean.”
Meyer clearly relished the opportunity to elaborate. “New developments in embryology and developmental biology are telling us that DNA, as important as it is, is not the whole show,” Meyer began.
“DNA provides some but not all of the information that’s needed to build a new organism with a novel form and function. You see, DNA builds proteins, but proteins have to be assembled into larger structures. There are different kinds of cells, and those cells have to be arranged into tissues, and tissues have to be arranged into organs, and organs have to be arranged into overall body plans.
“According to neo-Darwinism, new biological forms are created from mutations in DNA, with natural selection preserving and building on the favorable ones. But if DNA is only part of the story, then you can mutate it indefinitely and you’ll never build a fundamentally new body architecture.
“So when you encounter the Cambrian explosion, with its huge and sudden appearance of radically new body plans, you realize you need lots of new biological information. Some of it would be encoded for in DNA—although how that occurs is still an insurmountable problem for Darwinists. But on top of that, where does the new information come from that’s not attributable to DNA? How does the hierarchical arrangement of cells, tissues, organs, and body plans develop? Darwinists don’t have an answer. It’s not even on their radar.”
IN THE BLINK OF AN EYE
Using radiometric techniques to date zircon crystals in Siberia, scientists have recently been able to increase their accuracy in pinpointing the time frame of the Cambrian explosion, whose beginning they have determined to be some 530 million years ago.
Paleontologists now think that during a five-million-year (or even shorter) window of time, at least twenty and as many as thirty-five of the world’s forty phyla, the highest category in the animal kingdom, sprang forth with unique body plans. In fact, some experts believe that “all living phyla may have originated by the end of the explosion.” 30
To put this incredible speed into perspective, if you were to compress all of the Earth’s history into twenty-four hours, the Cambrian explosion would consume only about one minute. 31
“The Cambrian explosion represents an incredible quantum leap in biological complexity,” Meyer said. “Before then, life on Earth was pretty simple—one-celled bacteria, blue-green algae, and later some sponges and primitive worms or mollusks. Then without any ancestors in the fossil record, we have a stunning variety of complex creatures appear in the blink of an eye, geologically speaking.
“For example the trilobite—with an articulated body, complicated nervous system, and compound eyes—suddenly shows up fully formed at the beginning of the explosion. It’s amazing! And this is followed by stasis, which means the basic body plans remained distinct over the eons.
“All of this totally contradicts Darwinism, which predicted the slow, gradual development in organisms over time. Darwin admitted the Cambrian explosion was ‘inexplicable’ and ‘a valid argument’ against his theory. He insisted ‘natura non facit saltum—nature takes no leaps.’ He thought he would be vindicated, however, as more fossils were discovered, but the picture has only gotten worse.
“The big issue is where did the information come from to build all these new proteins, cells, and body plans? For instance, Cambrian animals would have needed complex proteins, such as lysyl oxidase. In animals today, lysyl oxidase molecules require four hundred amino acids. Where did the genetic information come from to build those complicated molecules? This would require highly complex, specified genetic information of the sort that neither