Page 60 - The Evolution Impasse 1

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M Marrella: One of the inter- -
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pon it came to influence Darwin. claim, different species actually emerged
suddenly on Earth, with no forerunners
Burgess Shale preceding them.
The Burgess Shale region in the Ca- The February 1999 edition of the
nadian province of British Columbia well-known scientific journal Trends in
contains a fossil bed now regarded as Genetics expressed this difficulty con-
one of the most important paleontologi- fronting Darwinism:
cal discoveries of our time. The fossils It might seem odd that fossils from one
in this region belong to very different small locality, no matter how exciting,
species and appear suddenly, with no fo- should lie at the center of a fierce debate
rerunners in earlier strata. about such broad issues in evolutionary
As we know, the theory of evolution biology. The reason is that animals burst
into the fossil record in astonishing pro-
maintains that all living species evolved
fusion during the Cambrian, seemingly
in stages from other species that lived
from nowhere. Increasingly precise radi-
before them. The Burgess Shale fossils
ometric dating and new fossil discoveries
and similar paleontological discoveries,
have only sharpened the suddenness and
however, show that in contrast to this
scope of this biological revolution. The
magnitude of this change in Earth's biota
demands an explanation. Although many
hypotheses have been proposed, the ge-
neral consensus is that none is wholly
convincing. 61
In this context, the journal refers
to two famous evolutionist authorities
Stephen Jay Gould and Simon Con-
way Morris. Both have written books
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A A fossil thorn discovered in Burgess Shale THE EVOLUTION IMPASSE I
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