Creation Moment 11/2/2015 - Biological "Big Bang" Mystery

 For he spake, and it was done; (Mystery SOLVED)

Psalm 33:9 

"A recent video from The Economist takes on the evolution of animals in the Cambrian explosion, conceding something that many Darwin advocates refuse to fully acknowledge: that "biology's big bang" is a "mystery." 

• Narrator: "The cause of this sudden burst of life, which geologists call the Cambrian explosion, remains a mystery."


• Andrew Parker, Professor of Life Sciences at the Natural History Museum of London: "The Cambrian explosion was really biology's big bang. Things went from moving really slowly on the sea floor without any predation to suddenly all the different type of ecologies that we see today. Life literally exploded."


• Simon Conway Morris, Professor of Evolutionary Paleobiology at the University of Cambridge: "What triggered the Cambrian explosion? We don't really know. There are many different possibilities, different hypotheses. And we've got to remember that cause and effect are often difficult to disentangle."

The video then discusses the period prior to the Cambrian called the Ediacaran. But Conway Morris admits that the organisms that lived in this period are not clearly related to the Cambrian animals:

"Before the Cambrian we go into what's called the Ediacaran times. And this is an extraordinary interval where we have the sea floor populated by basically weird creatures. And quite frankly we're not quite sure if they're animals or something else entirely." He explains that these strange organisms "seem to more or less disappear as the Cambrian explosion kicks off."This is a nice statement of the problem. The video offers some of the standard weak and inadequate explanations we've seen in the past for how the Cambrian explosion occurred. For example, it cites rising oxygen levels as a possible trigger for building larger animals. We have discussed the problems with that theory here, here, here, and here. The video admits, "Evidence to support this theory of higher oxygen levels is scarce" since the ice ages that might have led to larger algae populations which raised oxygen levels "ended 90 million years before the Cambrian." 


The video also notes the hypothesis "that minerals became increasingly available in the oceans due to post-glacial erosion." These minerals might have spurred the evolution of shells, but the video notes a problem with this hypothesis:

But Cambrian shells were made from a range of materials. This suggests they [were] the result of parallel evolution in different animals lines, not a single innovation. That means something encouraged them to develop on more than one occasion. And shells are costly to make. It's unlikely mere abundance of minerals would have been enough.

We've also discussed problems with this hypothesis here and here.So how did the Cambrian animals evolve so rapidly? The key to understanding the typical evolutionary position on this question is to appreciate that most evolutionists really aren't trying to answer that question -- at least not in any meaningful way.
ID proponents look at the question and think, "Well, to build all these animals you're going to need an extraordinary amount of new genetic and epigenetic information, and it's got to arise very quickly. We must identify some mechanism -- evolutionary or otherwise -- that can accomplish this feat." EN&V