Page 44 - Atlas of Creation Volume 4

Cambrian life forms, with far more complex structures than those

of many life forms living today, cause evolutionists to despair

According to evolutionary claims, the Cambrian Period is very early for the high level of biolog-

ical complexity it exhibits. Darwinists claim that the complex structures possessed by living things
are acquired gradually, over long periods of time. Therefore, species must have possessed rudimen-
tary, primitive characteristics at the start of their supposed evolutionary histories and acquired more
complex features only at the end of a very lengthy evolutionary process.

In fact, however, the history of life presents the exact opposite picture. The first creatures shared
the same basic body structures as those living today; and the same complex organs such as eyes, an-
tennae, limbs, mouths and guts. Therefore, complexity is a characteristic that came “in the first mo-
ment” in the history of life, rather than late. It has been in existence since they first appeared. This,

no doubt, is a great impasse for evolutionists. The evolutionist researchers Marshall Kay and Edwin
H. Colbert state that this state of affairs is an insoluble dilemma for Darwinists:

“The introduction of a variety of organisms in the early Cambrian, including such complex forms of the
arthropods as the trilobites, is surprising . . . The introduction of abundant organisms in the record would

not be so surprising if they were simple. Why should such complex organic forms be in rocks about 600
million years old and be absent or unrecognized in the records of the preceding two billion years? . . . If
there has been evolution of life, the absence of the requisite fossils in the rocks older than the Cambrian
is puzzling.” 11

By hiding behind the concept of a “puzzle,” these evolutionist researchers are trying to gloss over
the fact that all these complex systems emerged suddenly, hundreds of millions of years ago—a fact

that by itself is enough to completely repudiate Darwinism. To show why this early complexity has
such a devastating effect on Darwinism, it will be useful to examine the trilobite and the perfect and
highly sophisticated structure of its eye.
Richard Fortey, an evolutionist paleontologist from London’s Natural History Museum, com-

ments on the great number of lenses in some trilobite eyes:

“One of the most difficult jobs I ever attempted was to count the number of lenses in a large trilobite eye.
I took several photographs of the eye from the different angles and then made enormous prints magni-
fied large enough to see individual lenses. I started counting as one might, “One, two, three, four. . . ” and
so on, to a hundred or two. The trouble was that you had only to look away for an instant, or sneeze, to

forget exactly where you were, so it was back again to “One, two, three...” ... I got to a total of more than
three thousand before I vowed that, in future, I would simply estimate the number of lenses in a bit of
an eye, and use my best arithmetic to estimate the whole number.” 12

More than 3,000 lenses means that the animal in question re-
ceived more than 3,000 images. This clearly shows the de-
gree of the complexity in the eye and brain structure

of a creature that lived 530 million years ago. This
flawless structure cannot have come into exis-
tence through evolution, as is set out by David

Raup, a professor of geology from Harvard,
Rochester and Chicago universities:

“Thus the trilobites 450 million years ago used an
optimal design which would require a well
trained and imaginative optical engineer to devel-

op today—or one who was familiar with the seven-
teenth-century optical literature.” 13

42 Atlas of Creation Vol. 4