Uncommon Descent reports on a new paper in the most prestigious peer-reviewed science journal.
Excerpt:
A new paper has just been published in Nature by Gregory J. Retallack of the University of Oregon. The paper argues that the Ediacaran fauna are not ancestral to the animals which arose in the Cambrian explosion and that life existed on land 65 million years before previously thought. Retallack further argues that the iconic fossils of Dickinsonia and Springgina, which appear in the Precambrian Ediacaran assemblages, were not in fact animals at all. Rather they were, according to Retallack, lichens, soil structures and traces of slime moulds.
And they link to this post about the paper from Science Daily, which makes the significance of the discovery even clearer:
Ancient multicellular fossils long thought to be ancestors of early marine life are remnants of land-dwelling lichen or other microbial colonies, says University of Oregon scientist Gregory J. Retallack, who has been studying fossil soils of South Australia.
[...]“This discovery has implications for the tree of life, because it removes Ediacaran fossils from the ancestry of animals,” said Retallack, professor of geological sciences and co-director of paleontological collections at the UO’s Museum of Natural and Cultural History. His evidence, mostly gathered from a site in the Flinders Ranges, is presented in a paper placed online ahead of print by the journal Nature.
“These fossils have been a first-class scientific mystery,” he said. “They are the oldest large multicellular fossils. They lived immediately before the Cambrian evolutionary explosion that gave rise to familiar modern groups of animals.”
Retallack studied numerous Ediacaran fossils and determined that the diversity reflects a preference by the ancient organisms for “unfrozen, low salinity soils, rich in nutrients, like most terrestrial organisms.” Thus the fossils in Australia’s iconic red-rock ranges, he concludes, were landlubbers. In his closing paragraph, Retallack outlines implications for a variety of other Edicaran fossils, that could have been lichens, other microbial consortia, fungal fruiting bodies, slime molds, flanged pedestals of biological soil crusts, and even casts of needle ice.
Ediacaran fossils, he said, represent “an independent evolutionary radiation of life on land that preceded by at least 20 million years the Cambrian evolutionary explosion of animals in the sea.” Increased chemical weathering by large organisms on land may have been needed to fuel the demand of nutrient elements by Cambrian animals. Independent discoveries of Cambrian fossils comparable with Ediacaran ones is evidence, he said, that even in the Cambrian, more than 500 million years ago, life on land may have been larger and more complex than life in the sea.
Here’s a quick re-cap of the Cambrian explosion:
Part 1: (7:50)
Part 2: (3:25)
This explosion in biological complexity fits nicely with an intelligent designer . Intelligent agents make information by sequencing symbols into functional instructions. That’s what new body plans are. It’s like new software, and new software requires a software engineer.
The standard naturalist response to this problem of sudden origins of anaimal body plans used to be that the Cambrian explosion did have precursors. The precursors were thought to be the Ediacaran fossils. But that’s all been shot to Hell now, with this new paper in Nature. Ooops!
Filed under: News, Atheism, Body, Cambrian, Cambrian Era, Cambrian Explosion, Darwin, Darwinism, Dickinsonia, Ediacaran Fauna, Ediacaran Fossils, Evolution, Fossil Record, Fossils, Information, Life, Materialism, Naturalism, Origin, Springgina
08/03/2010 • 6:00 PM 0
Are there any fossilized precursors to the Cambrian explosion?
Consider this article in the New York Times regarding the Cambrian explosion, which is one of the arguments for intelligent design from the sudden origin of all phyla in a brief period during the Cambrian era, with no precursors.
Excerpt:
Are the Ediacaran fossils precursors to the many different phyla that appear suddenly in the Cambrian explosion?
Jonathan McLatchie of Evolution News responds:
I, for one, am at a loss as to why Carroll and his fellow evolutionary theorizers find this sort of argumentation to be a convincing rebuttal to the Cambrian challenge to Darwin’s theory. Far from resolving Darwin’s dilemma, the presence of precambrian softbodied organisms — particularly the sponge embryos — only serves to deepen it and make the problem far worse. Darwinists want to have it both ways: “The conditions of the Cambrian were not suitable for the preservation of softbodied organisms so we shouldn’t expect to see the immediate precursors to the Cambrian fauna. Oh, and by the way, did we mention that the Cambrian wasn’t really an explosion at all because we have found soft bodied organisms in the Ediacaran assemblages, including the Cnidaria and even sponge embryos?”
At any rate, as discussed in some detail here, the Ediacaran fauna are not generally thought to be ancestral to the modern phyla which appear explosively in the Cambrian radiation. The presence of these organisms, therefore, should offer no comfort to Darwinists. As Peter Ward has observed in On Methuselah’s Trail: Living Fossils and the Great Extinctions, “[L]ater study cast doubt on the affinity between these ancient remains preserved in sandstones and living creatures of today; the great German paleontologist A. Seilacher, of Tübingen University, has even gone so far as to suggest that the Ediacaran fauna has no relationship whatsoever with any currently living creatures. In this view, the Ediacaran fauna was completely annihilated before the start of the Cambrian fauna.” (p. 36)
This is worth reading for the people who want to understand how naturalists respond to ID arguments regarding sudden origin of all major forms of life 543 million years ago in the fossil record. Darwinists have to explain the origin of life and the origin of phyla. It does no good for them to talk about whales and horses when that’s not where the action is.
Related posts
Share this:
Like this:
Filed under: Commentary, 540, 543, Atheism, Biology, Cambrian, Cambrian Era, Cambrian Explosion, Darwin, Darwinism, Ediacaran Fauna, Ediacaran Fossils, Evolution, Fossil, Gradual, Gradualism, Information, Intelligent Design, Life, Materialism, Naturalism, Origin, Paleontology, Period, Phyla, Precursor, Sudden