Page 48 - The Transitional Form Dilemma

THE TRANSITIONAL-FORM DILEMMA

One of the world’s most prominent critics of Darwinism,
Professor Philip Johnson of University of California, describes these
events as being in clear contradiction of Darwinism:
Darwinian theory predicts a “cone of increasing diversity,” as the first living
organism, or first animal species, gradually and continually diversifies to cre-
ate the various levels of the taxonomic order. The animal fossil record more re-
sembles such a cone turned upside down, with the phyla present at the start
and thereafter decreasing. 10
As Johnson points out, far from phyla emerging in stages, all of
them came into being suddenly, and some even became extinct during
the periods which followed. In the earlier Precambrian Period, there
were only three phyla, all consisting of single-celled and simple multi-
celled life forms. In the Cambrian Period, on the other hand, 60 to 100
different animal phyla suddenly emerged. A number of these became
extinct in the period which followed, with only a few of these phyla
surviving down to the present day.
Science journalist Roger Lewin refers to this extraordinary situa-
tion, which completely cuts the ground from under the feet of all of
Darwinism’s regarding the history of life:
Described recently as “the most important evolutionary event during the en-
tire history of the Metazoa,” the Cambrian explosion established virtually all
the major animal body forms—Bauplane or phyla—that would exist there-
after, including many that were “weeded out” and became extinct. Compared
with the 30 or so extant phyla, some people estimate that the Cambrian explo-
sion may have generated as many as 100. 11

Professor emeritus of integrative biology James W. Valentine, the
paleontologists Stanley Awramik, Philip W. Signor, and Peter Sadler
make this comment about the Cambrian explosion:
Taxa recognized as orders during the [Precambrian-Cambrian] transition
chiefly appear without connection to an ancestral clade via a fossil intermedi-
ate. This situation is in fact true of most invertebrate orders during the re-
maining Phanerozoic as well. There are no chains of taxa leading gradually
from an ancestral condition to the new ordinal body type. 12

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