Page 190 - The Cambrian Evidence that Darwin Failed to Comprehend
P. 190
The Cambrian Evidence That Darwin Failed to Comprehend
Faced With the Cambrian Fauna, Neo-Darwinism
Is at a Complete Dead End
The worst impasse facing neo-Darwinism with regard to
Cambrian life forms is the great cellular variety that suddenly
emerged. Studies on present-day organisms reveal that the sponges
that appeared in the pre-Cambrian would have required five differ-
ent types of cell. 135 Accordingly, the even more complex life forms
that appeared in the Cambrian must have possessed even greater
number and variety of cells, because the different characteristics and
functions in organisms always require the different functions of dif-
ferent cell types.
New proteins also need new genetic information. Neo-
Darwinism has to account for the formation of each one of these new
cell types and proteins that appeared.
As we have seen earlier in the book, in order to maintain life,
the minimally complex single-celled organism requires between 318
to 562 kilobase pairs of DNA. More complex single-celled organisms
require 1 million base pairs. Therefore, ever-increasing coding in-
structions are needed for the production of the proteins necessary to
give rise to any arthropod as complex as the trilobite.
For example, the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster, a present-day
arthropod, requires around 180 million base pairs of DNA. For a sin-
gle cell to develop into a colony requires a very serious increase in
cellular variety and an enormous, error-free genetic variety. 136
In order for multi-celled organisms to emerge from a single cell,
therefore, enormous increases in specified genetic information are
needed. At the same time, proteins—the product of the genes—must
be arranged into high levels of organization. New types of cell re-
quire new proteins, which have to be organized into new systems
within the cell. And these new cell types must be arranged into new
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