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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