Page 211 - The Cambrian Evidence that Darwin Failed to Comprehend

T hese words from Stephen Jay Gould’s

Book of Life provide an important sum-
mary regarding the present glorious variety of life on
Earth:

Animal life today is phenomenally diverse, more so than any oth-
er of life’s six kingdoms. Over the past three centuries, scientists
have described an estimated 1.5 million species of living animals,
but so many more species have not yet been studied—particularly
small ones in the tropics—that true totals of 5 or even 50 million
have been guessed at. Most of these species (mostly arthropods and
parasites, 75 percent of all species) live on the land. Far fewer spe-
cies live in the oceans (about 295,000 have been recognized). Yet it is
the ocean that contains more of the main divisions of the animal
kingdom, the phyla—almost every one of them . . . 152
With the theory they propose, evolutionists must ex-
plain this extraordinary variety and what happened be-
fore it. They must show how a one-celled bacterium
could eventually develop into a whale as well as
give rise to millions of other animal species.
Evolutionists must produce an evolutiona-
ry scenario for each one of these spe-
cies, and prove it by pointing to
signs in the fossil record

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