A gap in logic?

Organisms are ordered for classification purposes into groups nested within larger and larger groups. All organisms are assumed to be related, and therefore all are made to fit this pattern, whether the similarities between groups are obvious or obscure. The thinking is: “Since we can see evolution going on at the lower levels, within species, genera and families, it may be presumed to have gone on at all levels. Ultimately all organisms are related to each other.”

A more rigorous, questioning approach seems required. Before we jump to the conclusion that all organisms are related to each other, we ought to be considering the possibility that evolution has been going on only at the lower levels. Here the primary evidence is the fossil record. Does it show continuous, gradual evolution from a common ancestor?

A gap through five sixths of the fossil evidence

There are many enigmas in the fossil record, but perhaps the most puzzling is the ‘Cambrian Explosion’. The first five-sixths of the record reveal only bacteria and algae. Then strange marine organisms known as the ‘Ediacarans’ appear, followed a hundred million years later, in the Cambrian period, by an even more astonishing burst of creativity:

Described recently as ‘the most important evolution- ary event during the entire history of the Metazoa’, the Cambrian explosion established virtually all the major animal body forms 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. … 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?

Roger Lewin, Science 241:291 (1988)

All at once we see sponges, molluscs, brachiopods, crustaceans, trilobites, foraging and tube-dwelling worms, as well as a host of animals that have not even remote analogues in the modern world. None of them are preceded by evolutionary ancestors.

Gaps between fossil groups

The Cambrian Explosion would be difficult enough for Darwin’s theory and for the credibility of those who ardently promote it, if it were a unique phenomenon. But it is not. As Niles Eldredge summarises:

Most families, orders, classes, and phyla appear rather suddenly in the fossil record, often without anatomically intermediate forms smoothly interlinking evolutionarily derived descendant taxa [organisms] with their presumed ancestors.

Macro-Evolutionary Dynamics: Species, Niches, and Adaptive Peak (1989), p 22

Gradually increasing complexity is not the overall message of the fossil record.

If the theory of evolution were true, fossils over time would show a pattern which corresponds to the way scientists order organisms into a single ‘tree of life’. For example, we should be able to see lions, leopards and sabre-toothed tigers descending from an ancestor which links them into one cat family, Felidae. Further back in time, we should see felids and canids (dogs) descending from an ancestor which links them into the order Carnivora. Carnivora should link back to a common ancestor with all mammals, and, still further back, mammals should link back to a common ancestor with all animals that have a spinal column. All vertebrates should share a common ancestor with all invertebrate animals, such as worms and shellfish. All animals, vertebrate and invertebrate, should share a common ancestor with plants, fungi, protists, archaea and bacteria.

These expectations are, in part, fulfilled – but only in part. Back as far as the Oligocene the cat family shows a fairly continuous branching pattern:

Before that, the trail becomes more obscure, but it seems likely that the early cats descended from a suborder called Feliformia, which included also the ancestors of modern civets, mongooses and hyenas. These take us back to the Palaeocene. The origin of the Feliformia, however, cannot be traced. According to theory, these should share a common ancestor with dogs, bears and seals, and a little earlier still, with armadillos, ant-eaters, bats and primates. But fossils of such ancestors have not been found. As Philip Gingerich, an expert on the mammal record, put it:

The beginning of the Eocene is marked… by the sudden appearance of mammals belonging to modern orders. For example, Rodentia, Primates, Chiroptera [bats], primitive true Carnivora, Artiodactyla [cattle, hippopotami], and Perissodactyla [e.g. horses, rhinoceroses] all make their first appearance. … We do not have a fossil record actually documenting the origin of any of these major groups.

From A. Hallam (ed.), Patterns of Evolution as Illustrated by the Fossil Record (1977)

What is true for mammals is also true for other large groups. Above the level of family or order there is no evidence for evolution. Niles Eldredge again:

There are all sorts of gaps: absence of gradationally intermediate ‘transitional’ forms between species, but also between larger groups - between, say, families of carnivores, or the orders of mammals. In fact, the higher up the Linnaean hierarchy you look, the fewer transitional forms there seem to be.

The Monkey Business: A Scientist Looks at Creationism (1982), p 65.

The fossil record as a whole does not show a single branching tree. The pattern is more like an orchard of trees.

An alternative interpretation

If the fossil record does not reveal evidence for the Darwinian story, what does it show? It certainly does not show animals all being buried and fossilised in a global flood. Among the many difficulties of that idea, we need only repeat that limited evolution can be seen going on throughout Earth history. What we need is an explanation that does justice to both the continuities and the discontinuities.

The key to a solution lies at the very bottom of the Earth’s crust. If there is one enigma in the geological record to rival the Cambrian Explosion in the fossil record, it is that the first 700 million years of Earth’s history (in radioisotope time) are missing. Could this correspond to the originally created world, which was so absolutely destroyed that all terrestrial life was ‘blotted out’?

In a nutshell, we suggest that the sudden successive appearances of animals unrelated to their predecessors represent points in time when, in an unstable world recovering from a global cataclysm, surviving populations had simply recovered in sufficient numbers to stand a chance of being fossilised.

To find out more about this, go to the website Earth History: A New Approach, sponsored by Noah’s Ark Zoo Farm.