Page 611 - Atlas of Creation Volume 2

Harun Yahya

The so-called
"tree of life"
drawn by the
evolutionary
biologist Ernst
Haeckel in
1866

swered by evolutionists. The Oxford University zoologist Richard Dawkins, one of the foremost advocates of
evolutionist thought in the world, comments on this reality that undermines the very foundation of all the ar-
guments he has been defending:

For example the Cambrian strata of rocks… are the oldest ones in which we find most of the major invertebrate

groups. And we find many of them already in an advanced state of evolution, the very first time they appear. It
is as though they were just planted there, without any evolutionary history 31

Phillip Johnson, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley who is also one of the world's fore-
most critics of Darwinism, describes the contradiction between this paleontological truth and Darwinism:

Darwinian theory predicts a "cone of increasing diversity," as the first living organism, or first animal species,
gradually and continually diversified to create the higher levels of taxonomic order. The animal fossil record
more resembles such a cone turned upside down, with the phyla present at the start and thereafter decreas-

ing. 32

As Phillip Johnson has revealed, far from its being the case that phyla came about by stages, in reality they
all came into being at once, and some of them even became extinct in later periods. The diagrams on page 610
reveal the truth that the fossil record has revealed concerning the origin of phyla.
As we can see, in the Precambrian Age there were three different phyla consisting of single-cell creatures.
But in the Cambrian Age, some 60 to 100 different animal phyla emerged all of a sudden. In the age that fol-
lowed, some of these phyla became extinct, and only a few have come down to our day.

Adnan Oktar 609