Evolution? How?

However when we look at the fossil record what appears, but a dozen or so major animal groups all during a (relatively) short time in geologic history. This Cambrian period, lasting only about 40-50 million years, or about 1% of the Earth's supposed history, shows these major groups fully formed and distinct.

Most of the planets spin on an axis nearly perpendicular to the plane of the ecliptic but Uranus' axis is almost parallel to the ecliptic. At the time of Voyager 2's passage, Uranus' south pole was pointed almost directly at the Sun. This results in the odd fact that Uranus' polar regions receive more energy input from the Sun than do its equatorial regions. Uranus is nevertheless hotter at its equator than at its poles. The mechanism underlying this is unknown.

Actually, there's an ongoing battle over which of Uranus' poles is its north pole! Either its axial inclination is a bit over 90 degrees and its rotation is direct, or it's a bit less than 90 degrees and the rotation is retrograde. The problem is that you need to draw a dividing line *somewhere*, because in a case like Venus there is little dispute that the rotation is indeed retrograde (not a direct rotation with an inclination of nearly 180).

That's right on the money. Just because two things share similarities doesn't mean one must have produced the other. Why would it? And piling one above the other doesn't really help your case any.

If this were true then we should have found many more early humans than we have, shouldn't we? Even postulating an extremely small population of humans that held steady for most of that time from 3MY to the beginning of the present century (say 100,000 living at any given time. Many evolutionists postulate a much bigger number for much of that time) just barely replacing their numbers, you have 100,000+ generations of humans to account for. Where are the bodies? Where are the artifacts representing this number of people?

Orthodox evolutionary theory dictates that the major animal groups appeared in a precise succession, one after the other, in a distinct order that cannot be changed else the whole thing falls apart.

Orthodox evolutionary theory dictates that the major animal groups appeared in a precise succession, one after the other, in a distinct order that cannot be changed else the whole thing falls apart.[/u] This slow progression, we are told, had to have taken a very long time, thus the evolutionists insistence on an age of the Earth of minimum 4+ billion years.

I think we need a thread that asks. Why is the Bible a lousy science book?

real life to neo

Quote:

However when we look at the fossil record what appears, but a dozen or so major animal groups all during a (relatively) short time in geologic history. This Cambrian period, lasting only about 40-50 million years, or about 1% of the Earth's supposed history, shows these major groups fully formed and distinct.

Again, how lovely is ignorance. The Cambrian "sputter" followed an Ediacaran sequence and a Vendean sequence where most of the CE fossil types were seen first (Thats an additional almost 100 million years)(Narbonne 1998, and Narbonne and Gehling 2003) These biota included some arthropod like types, annelids,mo;;uscans etc or about half the Cambrian assemblages. AND , it corresponded to the accretion of Gondwana and the latest stages of rifting of Rodinia (rodgers and Santosh 2004).
The real "Heavy lifting of evolution" was acccomplished in the Paleozoic (about 220 million years long) in the Paleozoic most of the bauplans were established and major forms evolved (OH unless you dont count birds, and dinosaurs, and mammals, and angiosperm plants.........

The Cambrian Explosion:


For most of the nearly 4 billion years that life has existed on Earth, evolution produced little beyond bacteria, plankton, and multi-celled algae. But beginning about 600 million years ago in the Precambrian, the fossil record speaks of more rapid change. First, there was the rise and fall of mysterious creatures of the Ediacaran fauna, named for the fossil site in Australia where they were first discovered. Some of these animals may have belonged to groups that survive today, but others don't seem at all related to animals we know.

Then, between about 570 and 530 million years ago, another burst of diversification occurred, with the eventual appearance of the lineages of almost all animals living today. This stunning and unique evolutionary flowering is termed the "Cambrian explosion," taking the name of the geological age in whose early part it occurred. But it was not as rapid as an explosion: the changes seems to have happened in a range of about 30 million years, and some stages took 5 to 10 million years.

It's important to remember that what we call "the fossil record" is only the available fossil record. In order to be available to us, the remains of ancient plants and animals have to be preserved first, and this means that they need to have fossilizable parts and to be buried in an environment that will not destroy them.

It has long been suspected that the sparseness of the pre-Cambrian fossil record reflects these two problems. First, organisms may not have sequestered and secreted much in the way of fossilizable hard parts; and second, the environments in which they lived may have characteristically dissolved those hard parts after death and recycled them. An exception was the mysterious "small shelly fauna" -- minute shelled animals that are hard to categorize -- that left abundant fossils in the early Cambrian. Recently, minute fossil embryos dating to 570 million years ago have also been discovered. Even organisms that hadn't evolved hard parts, and thus didn't leave fossils of their bodies, left fossils of the trails they made as they moved through the Precambrian mud. Life was flourishing long before the Cambrian "explosion".

The best record of the Cambrian diversification is the Burgess Shale in British Columbia. Laid down in the middle-Cambrian, when the "explosion" had already been underway for several million years, this formation contains the first appearance in the fossil record of brachiopods, with clamlike shells, as well as trilobites, mollusks, echinoderms, and many odd animals that probably belong to extinct lineages. They include Opabinia, with five eyes and a nose like a fire hose, and Wiwaxia, an armored slug with two rows of upright scales.

The question of how so many immense changes occurred in such a short time is one that stirs scientists. Why did many fundamentally different body plans evolve so early and in such profusion? Some point to the increase in oxygen that began around 700 million years ago, providing fuel for movement and the evolution of more complex body structures. Others propose that an extinction of life just before the Cambrian opened up ecological roles, or "adaptive space," that the new forms exploited. External, ecological factors like these were undoubtedly important in creating the opportunity for the Cambrian explosion to occur.

Internal, genetic factors were also crucial. Recent research suggests that the period prior to the Cambrian explosion saw the gradual evolution of a "genetic tool kit" of genes that govern developmental processes. Once assembled, this genetic tool kit enabled an unprecedented period of evolutionary experimentation -- and competition. Many forms seen in the fossil record of the Cambrian disappeared without trace. Once the body plans that proved most successful came to dominate the biosphere, evolution never had such a free hand again, and evolutionary change was limited to relatively minor tinkering with the body plans that already existed.

Interpretations of this critical period are subject of lively debate among scientists like Stephen Jay Gould of Harvard University and Simon Conway Morris of Cambridge University. Gould emphasizes the role of chance. He argues that if one could "rerun the tape" of that evolutionary event, a completely different path might have developed and would likely not have included a humanlike creature. Morris, on the other hand, contends that the environment of our planet would have created selection pressures that would likely have produced similar forms of life to those around us -- including humans.

The earliest morphological evidence for life is 3.5 billion years old, fossils of stromatolites (colonies of cyanobacteria) and single, undifferentiated cells, or Prokaryotes. For 1.6 billion years these simple cells were the only kind of living organism, until the arrival of Eukaryotes, or single cells with differentiated nuclei and cell organelles. Although representing a large leap in complexity, the Eukaryotes were still only single cells or cell aggregates. It was another 1.4 billion years before complex, multicellular life made an appearance in the form of the Ediacaran faunas (see fossils), followed by all the variety of the true Cambrian animals about 550 million years ago.

Therefore 80% of the history of life on Earth is exclusively single or undifferentiated multi-cellular. 3 billion years went by before complex multicellular life appeared, but when it did it only took between 5 and 10 million years for all the basic body plans of the organisms we see around us today to be established. This is why the origin of multicellular life, in particular the metazoans or large animals with complex body plans, is termed the Cambrian explosion.

Described recently as "the most important evolutionary event during the entire history of the Metazoa," the Cambrian explosion established virtually all the major animal body forms -- Bauplane or phyla -- that would exist thereafter, including many that were 'weeded out' and became extinct. Compared with the 30 or so extant phyla, some people estimate that the Cambrian explosion may have generated as many as 100. The evolutionary innovation of the Precambrian/Cambrian boundary had clearly been extremely broad: "unprecedented and unsurpassed," as James Valentine of the University of California, Santa Barbara, recently put it (Lewin, 1988).

Lewin then asked the all important question:

"Why, in subsequent periods of great evolutionary activity when countless species, genera, and families arose, have there been no new animal body plans produced, no new phyla?"

.......
Real life, I did confront your "retrograde gobbly gook" it was in a post about conservation of momentum and the fact that 99% of the planetary orbital motion is in the orbits of our planets and , if you count the Milky way galaxy , wow, that number would be pretty huge.
I guess you missed my missive

[.................
Ive forgotten your response to the "Island dilemma". However, everytime I talk with Creationists they always say that
"Island variations arent a problem for Creationists " and then cast a furtive glance and change the subject.
I submit that island variation is a huuuuge (kinda a deal breaker) problem for Creationism
Archipeligos have foundation species and "ring species" as well as, when separated in time and tectonics (like Australia) they develop unique higher orders that are found nowhere else and occur t a time that generally post dates some big tectonic breakup. Dinosaurs in Australia are similar to Jurassic dinosaurs in Patagonia, then through time, as Australia migrated to colder climes , Dinosaurs in South AMerica vastly differed from Australians. By the time the mass extinction occured , we had many different Families in each continent with same foundation species in earlier strata...............

neo, If all humans are the decendants of Noah and his family, how do we get Asians, American Indians, blacks, and whites without evolutionary causation?

Oh wonderful, a new loony, bereft of spelling skills and language skills, to throw into the debate more nonsense which is not germane to the topic of evolution.

I think we need a thread that asks. Why is the Bible a lousy science book?