The Case for a Creator - Lee Strobel [21]
“You come to the sixteen-yard line on the far end of the field, and now you see these sponges and maybe some jellyfish and worms. Then—boom!—in the space of a single stride, all these other forms of animals suddenly appear. As one evolutionary scientist said, the major animal groups ‘appear in the fossil record as Athena did from the head of Zeus—full blown and raring to go.’25
“Now, nobody can call that a branching tree! Some paleontologists, even though they may think Darwin’s overall theory is correct, call it a lawn rather than a tree, because you have these separate blades of grass sprouting up. One paleontologist in China says it actually stands Darwin’s tree on its head, because the major groups of animals—instead of coming last, at the top of the tree—come first, when animals make their first appearance.
“Either way, the result is the same: the Cambrian explosion has uprooted Darwin’s tree.”
THE HYPOTHESIS FAILS
There seemed, however, to be an easy comeback. “Maybe,” I said, “Darwin was right after all—the fossil record is still incomplete. Who knows how natural history might be rewritten next week by a discovery that will be made in a fossil dig somewhere? Or perhaps,” I speculated, “the organisms that existed prior to the Biological Big Bang were too small or their bodies were too soft to have left any trace in the fossil record.”
Having raised those objections, I sat back in my chair. “Frankly, you can’t prove otherwise,” I said, my words almost a taunt.
Wells yielded a little. “As a scientist,” he conceded, “I have to leave open the possibility that next year someone will discover a fossil bed in the Congo or somewhere that will suddenly fill in the gaps.”
I nodded at his admission. However, he wasn’t finished.
“But I sure don’t think that’s likely,” he added. “It hasn’t happened after all this time, and millions of fossils have already been dug up. There are certainly enough good sedimentary rocks from before the Cambrian era to have preserved ancestors if there were any. I have to agree with two experts in the field who said that the Cambrian explosion is ‘too big to be masked by flaws in the fossil record.’ 26
“As for the pre-Cambrian fossils being too tiny or soft to be preserved—well, we have microfossils of bacteria in rocks dating back more than three billion years. And there have been soft-bodied organisms from before the Cambrian that have been found in Australia. In fact, scientists have found soft-bodied animals in the Cambrian explosion itself. So I don’t think that’s a very good explanation, either. Today evolutionists are turning to molecular evidence to try to show there was a common ancestor prior to the Cambrian.”
“How does that work?” I asked.
“Not very well,” he quipped. “But here’s the process: you can’t get molecular evidence from the fossils themselves; all of it comes from living organisms. You take a molecule that’s basic to life—say, ribosomal RNA—and you examine it in a starfish, and then you study its equivalent in a snail, a worm, and a frog. You’re looking for similarities. If you compare this one molecule across different categories of animal body plans and find similarities, and if you make the assumption that they came from a common ancestor, then you can construct a theoretical evolutionary tree.
“But there are too many problems with this. If you compare this molecular tree with a tree based on anatomy, you get a different tree. You can examine another molecule and come up with another tree altogether. In fact, if you give one molecule to two different laboratories, you can get two different trees. There’s no consistency, including with the dating. It’s all over the board. Based on all this, I think it’s reasonable for me, as a scientist,