This week we look at Charles Darwin’s tree of life and shockingly find out that what it purports to show of what the fossil record should look like is not remotely what the fossil record actually looks like.  It turns out that the Cambrian Explosion pretty much wiped out Darwin’s tree.  From here you can see the fingerprint of life and God’s love for us. Resources:Lee Strobel, The Case for a Creator, 2004Stephen Meyer, The Return of the God Hypothesis, 2021Hugh Ross, Improbable Planet, 2016Jay Richards and Guillermo Gonzales, The Privileged Planet, 2004 I realized while preparing the next two episodes that they are in many ways a summary of the interview Lee Strobel conducts in the Case for a Creator.  I want to give full credit to Lee Strobel for doing an amazing job introducing this topic into my awareness and helping encourage me to dig deeper with some of the other resources listed. “The abrupt manner in which whole groups of species suddenly appear in certain formations, has been urged by several paleontologists…as a fatal objection to the belief in the transmutation of the species.  If numerous species, belonging to the same genera or families, have really started into life at once, the fact would be fatal to the theory of evolution through natural selection...But we continually overrate the perfection of the geological record, and falsely infer, because of certain genera or families have not been found beneath a certain stage, that they did not exist before that stage.  In all cases, positive paleontological evidence may be implicitly trusted; negative evidence is worthless, as experience has so often shown.  Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species, 1859  “To the question why we do not find rich fossiliferous deposits belonging to those assumed earliest periods prior to the Cambrian system, I can give no satisfactory answer.”  Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species, 1859 “The Cambrian strata of rocks, vintage about 600 million years, 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.”  Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design, 1987   “Although the Cambrian explosion of animals is especially striking, it is far from the only “explosion” of new living forms.  The first winged insects, birds, flowering plants, mammals, and many other groups also appear abruptly in the fossil record, with no apparent connection to putative ancestors in the lower, older layers of fossil-bearing sedimentary rock."  Stephen Meyer, Return of the God Hypothesis, 2021 “These first skeletal animals arrived not in just one or two phyla (basic body plans).  Fossils unearthed in southern China and in the Canadian Rockies reveal that 50-80 percent of the animal phyla known to exist at any time in Earth’s history appeared within no more than a few million years of one another, as the Cambrian geological period began, 542-543 million years ago…A team of geologists at Franklin and Marshall College showed that of the 182 animal skeletal designs theoretically permitted by the laws of physics, 146 appear in the Burgess Shale (Canadian Rockies) fossils.”  Hugh Ross, Improbable Planet, 2016 “..mutation and natural selection can account for “the survival of the fittest, but not the arrival of the fittest.”  Stephen Meyer, Return of the God Hypothesis, 2021

Ver todos los episodios