Ankerberg: You know, Stephen, what we just
watched is astonishing, alright.
Why is the explosion of animal fossils on
earth in the Cambrian time period such a challenge
to Darwin’s theory of how life originated?
Dr. Stephen Meyer: The abrupt appearance of
animal life in the Cambrian period is really
surprising for a couple of reasons.
First, it takes such a small percentage of
the total of geological history.
There is so much innovation that takes place
in such a small fraction of time that that’s
really unexpected.
You’d expect, on a Darwinian basis, that
you’d have the mechanism of natural selection,
random mutation, gradually producing little
incremental changes, and there’d be kind
of a steady increase in complexity over time.
But instead we see a very discontinuous or
discrete increase; and that increase is confined
to a very small percentage of geologic time.
Now, we might be tempted to think, well, yeah,
but still, the Cambrian explosion is roughly
a ten million year event.
That’s a lot of time.
It’s certainly a lot of time on the scale
of human history.
But what I think few of us realize, or recognize,
is that ten million years is actually a blink
of an eye biologically as well.
It’s a small amount of time in relation
to the amount of time that the mutation, natural
selection mechanism needs to work.
There’s a branch of evolutionary theory
known as population genetics.
It’s a very mathematical branch of biology
in which biologists are able to calculate
what they call waiting times.
This is the amount of time that you would
expect for a given evolutionary change to
take place.
And biologists can make these calculations
if they know something about the mutation
rate, the generation time, the size of the
populations of the different organisms that
are involved.
And recent calculations that have been made
in the field of population genetics are showing
that, if you need more than a few coordinated
mutations, the waiting times blow up beyond
hundreds of millions of years.
And so a ten million year window is a blink
of the eye biologically.
It’s not enough time even to generate a
few coordinated mutations, let alone the origin
of these extraordinarily complex animals.
Trilobites, for example, had compound eyes
that actually can be seen in the fossil remains
of these animals.
These are exquisitely complex forms of visual
apparatus that are preserved in the fossil
record.
And they arise, again, very abruptly and within
this ten, five million year window.
And this is really just not nearly enough
time for natural selection mutation to do
its work.
So it is very surprising and big challenge
to the creative power of the natural selection
mechanism.
