Ankerberg: What are neo-Darwinian paleontologists
now saying about what they’re going to do?
Meyer: Well, I think we should just talk about
paleontologists and Cambrian paleontologists,
because I think increasingly many paleontologists
are not necessarily committed to neo-Darwinism
because it has so many problems.
They are committed to some form of evolutionary
theory typically, but now many leading paleontologists,
certainly in China, but also leading American
paleontologists, are saying that whatever
we make of the Cambrian explosion, however
we attempt to explain it, we have to start
from the premise that this is a real event.
It’s not an artifact of incomplete sampling.
It’s not an artifact of incomplete preservation.
It’s a real event, and it has to be reckoned
with.
And some of the leading Chinese paleontologists,
J.Y.
Chen, has been very outspoken in making this
point.
There’s a major book on the Cambrian explosion
that came out in 2013 by Doug Erwin of the
Smithsonian Institution, and James Valentine,
who was shown in that previous clip from the
University of California Berkeley, in which
they make this same point; the Cambrian is
a real event.
We may not have a good explanation for it,
but we’ve got to reckon on the event as
something that really happened.
It’s not just something that is a kind of
allusion from our not being able to see what
happened in the lower strata.
We now have good reason to think that the
lower strata, or that the depositional environment
in the pre-Cambrian, was capable of preserving
even small and soft organisms.
And therefore, the absence of the ancestral
forms of the larger organisms with hard parts,
[they] should certainly have been there if
those animals existed, if those precursors
existed.
That they weren’t preserved is best explained
by the supposition that they weren’t there.
Ankerberg: Yeah.
What does this do to the neo-Darwinian theory?
Meyer: Well, it certainly, again, challenges
the neo-Darwinian picture of the history of
life.
The first complex forms of animal life seem
to arise very abruptly.
And it also challenges the idea that the neo-Darwinian
mechanism was the mechanism by which these
complex forms of life arose; because that
mechanism requires a vast amount of time,
and it should have left behind a vast number
of failed experiments, if you will.
It’s a trial and error mechanism where you
get lots of different variations arising,
different mutational changes arising.
So we ought to see the evidence of all those
failed trials in the lower strata.
And they’re not there.
So it raises questions both about the pattern,
the picture of the history of life that Darwin
proposed, but also it raises questions about
whether the mechanism of natural selection
and random mutation is really what was at
work in producing these first complex forms
of animal life.
