Thursday, July 1, 2010

2 Billion Year Old Multicellular Life!!!

Now this is something.

The Cambrian explosion has always been a dilemma. We can follow the development of life all the way back to the Cambrian period, about 570 million years ago, and we find some seriously developed organisms, all with no ancestry. As far as fossils go, life before the Cambrian was all unicellular—one-celled organisms.

Not any more ...

A Note on the Cambrian Explosion

The Cambrian explosion is NOT an argument against evolution. Even if science never explained the origin of the organisms that existed during the Cambrian, we still have to deal with the fact that life has changed dramatically since that time.

Not one vertebrate existed during the Cambrian period. Yes, our phylum—the chordates—was represented, but it was represented by something similar to a sea squirt. No fish; no amphibians; no reptiles, no dinosaurs, no birds, no bats, no cats, no primates.

See the sea squirt picture below. If God created all the phyla 570 billion years ago, suddenly and miraculously, you still have to explain how we got from sea squirts to us!

Photo by Nick Hobgood
Used with permission

Scientists have found 250 multicellular fossils from 2.1 billion years ago.

These fossils are up to a foot long, and they push multicellular life back far further than expected. It was surprise enough to find that prokaryotic (single-celled life without a nucleus) goes back 3.5 billion years, just a billion years after the earth formed.

It is true that findings are reforming science, but not in the direction of a young earth.

The author of this blog is a Christian who believes the Bible is inspired by God—all of it—but who does not believe we ought to resort to fabrication, deceit, quote-mining, and ignorance when it comes to looking at God's creation. It's the Bible that tells us to learn about God from nature, and what we learn is that God has chosen the painful, slow process of evolution to develop life.

Should that surprise us? Isn't that what we experience following Jesus Christ? Do we not progress slowly and painfully through death and suffering after we are born again?


 

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