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From: philjohn@garnet.berkeley.edu (Phillip Johnson)
Subject: SWAA Lecture
Date: 18 Jan 1993 16:25:42 GMT
)


     Darwinism's rules of reasoning not only protect the cultural
authority of Darwinists.  They also permit Darwinist writers to
take the mutation/selection mechanism for granted even when they
are describing evidence which directly contradicts it.  This feat
of intellectual contortionism is strikingly illustrated by
Stephen Jay Gould's book, Wonderful Life.  Gould's bestseller
adds a great deal to our knowledge of the "Cambrian explosion,"
meaning the sudden appearance of the invertebrate animal phyla,
without visible ancestors, in the 600 million-year-old rocks of
the Cambrian era.  Unicellular life had existed for a long time,
and some multicellular groups appear in the immediately
Precambrian rocks, but there is nothing that can be established
as ancestral to the Cambrian animals.  As Richard Dawkins
described the situation, "It is as though [the Cambrian phyla]
were just planted there, without any evolutionary history."     
     In recent years the mystery has deepened, because it appears
(at least according to Gould) that the Cambrian animal groups
were far more varied than had been imagined.  The more distinct
groups there were in the Cambrian, the more chains of ancestors
there ought to have been in the Precambrian.  Some remarkable
Cambrian fossils found in a Canadian formation known as the
Burgess Shale were originally classified in familiar groups. 
Gould explains that the discoverer of the Burgess Shale fossils,
Charles Walcott, tried to "shoehorn" the odd creatures into
familiar taxonomic categories because of his predisposition to
avoid multiplying the difficulties of what is called the
"artifact theory" of the Precambrian fossil record.  As Gould
explains the problem:

        Two different kinds of explanations for the absence     
     of Precambrian ancestors have been debated for more
     than a century: the artifact theory (they did exist,
     but the fossil record hasn't preserved them), and the
     fast-transition theory (they really didn't exist, at
     least as complex invertebrates easily linked to their
     descendants, and the evolution of modern anatomical
     plans occurred with a rapidity that threatens our 
     usual ideas about the stately pace of evolutionary
     change).

     The two drawings in the Appendix to this paper illustrate
both the problem the Cambrian Explosion poses for any theory of
evolution, and the way a museum exhibition attempts to control
the damage.  The Exhibition is titled "Life Through Time: The
Evidence for Evolution," and it is at the California Academy of
Sciences Museum in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco.   The
drawing on the right (not part of the museum exhibit) shows a
realistic picture of the evidence itself, with the phyla
appearing on parallel lines and absolutely no evidence of any
common ancestors or transitional intermediates.  The museum
exhibit on the left -- labelled the "Hard Facts Wall" -- dresses
up the evidence to force it into conformity with Darwinian
ideology.  The exhibit adds the hypothetical common ancestors and
alters the vertical dimension representing the age of the
fossils, in order to give the impression that the recalcitrant
data constitute the required "evidence for evolution."  At the
intersection point where the common ancestors ought to be, the
curators have placed magnifying glasses.  Similar devices are
used elsewhere in the exhibit to mark tiny animals or fossils. 
Unsophisticated museum visitors are apparently meant to get the
impression that the invisible common ancestors are known to
science, but just a little too small for the naked eye to see. 
By such means even a spectacular example of absence of evidence
for evolution can be transformed into evidence for evolution, and
even evidence for the creative power of natural selection.
     The museum exhibit illustrates the Cambrian Explosion with
just a few well-known groups and thus understates the difficulty
in reconciling the facts with any known theory of evolution. 
Reclassification of the Burgess Shale fossils has now established
some 15 or 20 Cambrian species that cannot be related to any
known group and therefore constitute distinct and previously
unknown phyla.  There are also many other species that can fit
within an existing phylum but are still remarkably distinct from
anything known to exist earlier or later.  The general history of
animal life is thus a burst of general body plans followed by
extinction.  Many species exist today which are absent from the
rocks of the remote past, but they fit within general taxonomic
categories present from the very beginning.  Darwinian theory
predicts a "cone of increasing diversity," as the first living
organism, or first animal species, gradually and continually
diversifies to create the various levels of the taxonomic order. 
The animal fossil record more resembles such a cone turned upside
down, with the phyla present at the start and thereafter
decreasing.   In short, the more we learn about the Cambrian
fossils, the more difficult it becomes to see them as the product
of Darwinian evolution.
     Gould describes the reclassification of the Burgess fossils
as the "death knell of the artifact theory," because it adds so
many new groups that appear without Precambrian ancestors.

     If evolution could produce ten new Cambrian phyla and
     then wipe them out just as quickly, then what about the     
     surviving Cambrian groups?  Why should they have had a     
     long and honorable Precambrian pedigree?  Why should
     they not have originated just before the Cambrian, as
     the fossil record, read literally, seems to indicate,
     and as the fast-transition theory proposes?
     A mysterious process that produces dozens of complex animal
groups directly from single-celled predecessors, with only some
words like "fast-transition" in between, may be called
"evolution" -- but the term is being used more in the sense of
Grasse's heresy than of Dobzhansky's Darwinian orthodoxy.  Each
of those Cambrian animals contained a variety of immensely
complicated organ systems.  How can such innovations appear
except by the gradual accumulation of micromutations, unless
there was some supernatural intervention?  It is not only that
the Darwinian theory requires a very gradual line of descent from
each Cambrian animal group back to its hypothetical single-celled
ancestor.  Because Darwinian evolution is a purposeless, chance-
driven process, which would not proceed directly from a starting
point to a destination, there should also be thick bushes of side
branches in each line.  As Darwin himself put it, if Darwinism is
true the Precambrian world must have "swarmed with living
creatures" many of which were ancestral to the Cambrian animals. 
If he really rejects the artifact theory of the Precambrian
fossil record, Gould also rejects the Darwinian theory of
evolution. 

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