https://evolutionnews.org/2024/08/fossil-friday-the-sudden-appearance-of-crocs-in-the-t...

"Like so many other groups, pseudosuchians appeared very abruptly in the Early Triassic period after the ‘Great Dying’ of the end-Permian mass extinction event about 250 million years ago.

"Just a few weeks ago a new fossil poposauroid pseudosuchian was described from the Middle Triassic Favret Formation in Nevada. The new genus received the almost unpronounceable name Benggwigwishingasuchus. The find was very surprising, because only marine organisms (e.g., ichthyosaurs and ammonites) were previously known from these sediments, which have been produced in an open sea environment. A co-author of the study remarked that their first reaction was “What the hell is this?” They certainly did not expect to find a terrestrial animal in these layers, but the well-preserved leg bones left no doubt that this reptile lacked any secondary aquatic adaptations and had a primarily terrestrial mode of life (Klein 2024). Because the preservation of the skeleton suggests a minimal post-mortem transport, the researchers suppose that it lived along the shores of the ancient Panthalassan Ocean. The authors concluded that the new discovery “implies a greater undiscovered diversity of poposauroids during the Early Triassic, and supports that the group, and pseudosuchians more broadly, diversified rapidly following the End-Permian mass extinction” (Smith et al. 2024). They also emphasize that more generally “recent studies have inferred a rapid diversification of archosaurs and their stem lineages, which established major clades by the end of the Early Triassic” (Smith et al. 2024).

"In other words, all the subgroups of archosaurs appeared abruptly in a kind of “explosion,” similar to the sudden appearance of 15 different families of marine reptiles in the Early Triassic (Bechly 2023a), or the sudden appearance of different groups of gliding and flying reptiles during the Middle Triassic (Bechly 2023b). Also, dinosaurs appeared so suddenly in the Late Triassic that one expert commented that “it’s amazing how clear cut the change from ‘no dinosaurs’ to ‘all dinosaurs’ was” (University of Bristol 2018). And famous paleontologist Peter Ward (2006: 160) explained that “the diversity of Triassic animal plans is analogous to the diversity of marine body plans that resulted from the Cambrian Explosion.” The Triassic period proves to be a real carpet bombing of bursts of biological creativity (Bechly 2024), which does not resonate well with a Darwinian paradigm at all."

Comment: According to Gould the great secret among paleontologists were the many gaps in evolution. This article shows them. De novo appearance is alive and well in evolution, not supporting Darwin at all. However, design is supported.

DAVID: A beautiful example of stretching/splitting the concept of species to make individual variation in color and song entirely separate species, when it is obvious they can breed if interested. True species cannot interbreed!! All the wildly different shapes, fur types and coloring don't split dogs into different species. Wild Darwinism on a rampage. I'm sure Darwin, himself, would find the same fault I do.

dhw: I also agree, and indeed Darwin himself emphasized the problem of defining speciation. However, I'm not happy with your heading, which does not describe the article but merely advertises your belief. That is why I have not put it under “Miscellany” and have given my response a different heading. Otherwise, it's always nice to record when we agree about something!

Thank you. I appreciate that you haven 't succumbed to stretching Darin's theory beyond all belief as Darwinists always do.

I also agree, and indeed Darwin himself emphasized the problem of defining speciation. However, I'm not happy with your heading, which does not describe the article but merely advertises your belief. That is why I have not put it under “Miscellany” and have given my response a different heading. Otherwise, it's always nice to record when we agree about something!

https://phys.org/news/2021-03-endangered-songbird-assumptions-evolution.html

"By comparing this bird to a closely related neighbor (the Tawny-Bellied Seedeater) in the same group (the southern capuchino seedeaters), the researchers determined that genetic shuffling of existing variations, rather than new random mutations, brought this species into existence—and their own behaviors are keeping them apart.

"This species is one of only two known examples across the globe to have traveled this path, challenging the typical assumptions of how new species form.

***

"The southern capuchino seedeaters are a group of recently evolved songbirds found throughout South America that is branching rapidly, with many of its species in the early stages of evolution. This family is best known for the dramatic variation with the males in terms of songs and plumage color, while the females are largely indistinguishable even to the most familiar researchers.

***

"What they found is that the two birds are closely related genetically, only distinguishable by the genes involved in plumage coloration. As well, they found that the males responded most aggressively to songs and plumage variations aligning with their own species.

"This all means that the species could very well reproduce and hybridize—they just choose not to, therefore reinforcing their own reproductive barriers.

"On a broader level, though, when comparing the Iberá Seedeater to other capuchino species, the researchers found that the Iberá Seedeater shares genomic variants with other capuchinos in these regions, but the variants have been shuffled to form a unique combination, which, the researchers argue, could be an evolutionary shortcut that most likely underlies much of the diversity among the different subspecies of this family.

"'This is a really beautiful story about a process that we have never seen in quite this way before," says co-author Irby Lovette, director of the Fuller Evolutionary Biology Program at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.

"'The classic and most common evolutionary model for new species is the accumulation of genetic mutations when those species are separated by a geographic barrier over perhaps millions of years. But here we found that genetic shuffling can happen quickly and without geographical isolation. It's almost like 'instant speciation.'"

***

"'This is the clearest example in birds of how reshuffling of genetic variation can generate a brand-new species."

"The only other organism where this type of evolution has been seen, according to Turbek, is a group of fish found in Africa called the Lake Victoria cichlids.

"'It's interesting to see this mechanism operating in something as different as birds," Turbek commented."

Comment: A beautiful example of stretching/splitting the concept of species to make individual variation in color and song entirely separate species, when it is obvious they can breed if interested. True species cannot interbreed!! All the wildly different shapes, fur types and coloring don't split dogs into different species. Wild Darwinism on a rampage. I'm sure Darwin, himself, would find the same fault I do.

https://evolutionnews.org/2020/09/was-kimberella-a-precambrian-mollusk/

"Kimberella indeed represents the strongest case for a bilaterian animal from the Ediacaran era. This is important because it would not only provide a minimum age for the earliest origin of Bilateria but would also predate the Cambrian explosion of bilaterian animal phyla as a kind of “advance guard”

***

"Because of the enormous importance of this crucial taxon for evolutionary biology, I reviewed for this article series every single paper that was ever published on it or even only discussed it, so that this synopsis and bibliography should even prove to be useful for experts, as nothing comparably comprehensive and up to date exists anywhere else.

"The hypothesis of a molluscan affinity of Kimberella is still prevailing in the technical and popular literature on Ediacaran biota.

"Peter Godfrey-Smith (2016), who wrote about Kimberella as the possible earliest mollusk in his bestselling book Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness, is quoted by McMenamin (2018) with the following remarkable statement: “One of my correspondents expressed concern that I was perpetuating a dubious interpretation of Kimberella as a mollusk; for another, Kimberella-as-mollusk is crucial to the interpretation of early bilaterian evolution.”

"In addition, eminent intelligent design theorist Stephen C. Meyer has acknowledged in his seminal book Darwin’s Doubt (Meyer 2013) that Kimberella could be an Ediacaran bilaterian animal and maybe even a mollusk. This was considered by other ID proponents as maybe too generous (Evolution News 2016). Let’s see what the published evidence says and follow the evidence wherever it leads."

Comment: Edicarans are very simple organisms and the bilaterians are symmetrical simple sac-like forms found in this period. So far no evidence of complex organ systems as in the Cambrian and better definition is very important as we study the so-called Cambrian gap in complexity. So far nothing closes the gap. I will follow and present Bechly 's follow-up articles.

dhw: The fossil is approx. 555 million years old. The mind boggles at the very thought of a “body” being preserved for that length of time. I really don’t see why we should not accept that it is yet another link in the chain of Darwinian common descent. We have discussed the Cambrian explosion many times, the last occasion being just a few weeks ago when I suggested that a major change in the environment (currently I think the pet theory is still an increase in oxygen) would have either necessitated or allowed for major changes organized by the intelligent cell communities of which all multicellular organisms are composed. I presume your theory is that a major change in the environment necessitated or allowed for major changes organized by God. Same process, different organizer. (NB my suggestion does not exclude God, who may have been the designer of cellular intelligence.)

DAVID: The bold is your pet theory, not mine. Oxygen usage is a very dangerous process, but currently is the major source of allowing life to create energy providing warm bodies with a maintained temperature. Our bodies contain antioxidants to protect us from oxygen damage. Oxidation is a forest fire, to remind all of how dangerous it is. Therefore the evolutionary development of oxygen use requires very complex design planning, far beyond pie-in-the-sky so-called cell committee intelligence. God didn't give the cells that ability. He designed new processes directly. What we see in cells that makes them seem intelligent, is the beautiful automaticity by which cells create their products and their responses to stimuli.

dhw: I was quoting the pet theory concerning the environmental change that triggered the Cambrian Explosion. It may have been something else. Whatever it was, we know that there was a creative “explosion” in which the structures of the cell communities of which all organisms are composed underwent colossal changes. I’m surprised at the authority with which you state that your God did it directly and did not design an autonomous intelligence which you consider to be a 50/50 possibility.

Another mistake or misdirection about my beliefs. I do not think an autonomous intelligence from God exists to allow evolutionary changes or daily adaptive changes beyond the epigenetic changes which we know about. For new species, God speciates. The 50/50 possibility is my honest observation of the odds of truth. I believe 100% that so-called cellular intelligence is cells following God-provided instructions.

dhw: It’s also surprising that he should specially design every single one of these new species when according to you all he really wanted to design was H. sapiens. But I am not supposed to look for any logical link between your various beliefs, am I?

Your logical beliefs are obviously not mine. Your imagined God and my belief in God result in two very different images of God with different modes of action. Once again you are wondering why God waited to create us, a humanizing view of God. Since God created the times lines of history, we simply know He decided to take the time.

DAVID: The bold is your pet theory, not mine. Oxygen usage is a very dangerous process, but currently is the major source of allowing life to create energy providing warm bodies with a maintained temperature. Our bodies contain antioxidants to protect us from oxygen damage. Oxidation is a forest fire, to remind all of how dangerous it is. Therefore the evolutionary development of oxygen use requires very complex design planning, far beyond pie-in-the-sky so-called cell committee intelligence. God didn't give the cells that ability. He designed new processes directly. What we see in cells that makes them seem intelligent, is the beautiful automaticity by which cells create their products and their responses to stimuli.

I was quoting the pet theory concerning the environmental change that triggered the Cambrian Explosion. It may have been something else. Whatever it was, we know that there was a creative “explosion” in which the structures of the cell communities of which all organisms are composed underwent colossal changes. I’m surprised at the authority with which you state that your God did it directly and did not design an autonomous intelligence which you consider to be a 50/50 possibility. It’s also surprising that he should specially design every single one of these new species when according to you all he really wanted to design was H. sapiens. But I am not supposed to look for any logical link between your various beliefs, am I?

QUOTE: Evolutionary biologists studying the genetics of modern animals predicted the oldest ancestor of all bilaterians would have been simple and small, with rudimentary sensory organs. Preserving and identifying the fossilized remains of such an animal was thought to be difficult, if not impossible.

DAVID: As usual the Darwinists try to diminish the Cambrian gap. No way. The Cambrians are still light years more complex than these guys. Of course this stage had to be there.

dhw: The fossil is approx. 555 million years old. The mind boggles at the very thought of a “body” being preserved for that length of time. I really don’t see why we should not accept that it is yet another link in the chain of Darwinian common descent. We have discussed the Cambrian explosion many times, the last occasion being just a few weeks ago when I suggested that a major change in the environment (currently I think the pet theory is still an increase in oxygen) would have either necessitated or allowed for major changes organized by the intelligent cell communities of which all multicellular organisms are composed. I presume your theory is that a major change in the environment necessitated or allowed for major changes organized by God. Same process, different organizer. (NB my suggestion does not exclude God, who may have been the designer of cellular intelligence.)

The bold is your pet theory, not mine. Oxygen usage is a very dangerous process, but currently is the major source of allowing life to create energy providing warm bodies with a maintained temperature. Our bodies contain antioxidants to protect us from oxygen damage. Oxidation is a forest fire, to remind all of how dangerous it is. Therefore the evolutionary development of oxygen use requires very complex design planning, far beyond pie-in-the-sky so-called cell committee intelligence. God didn't give the cells that ability. He designed new processes directly. What we see in cells that makes them seem intelligent, is the beautiful automaticity by which cells create their products and their responses to stimuli.

DAVID: As usual the Darwinists try to diminish the Cambrian gap. No way. The Cambrians are still light years more complex than these guys. Of course this stage had to be there.

The fossil is approx. 555 million years old. The mind boggles at the very thought of a “body” being preserved for that length of time. I really don’t see why we should not accept that it is yet another link in the chain of Darwinian common descent. We have discussed the Cambrian explosion many times, the last occasion being just a few weeks ago when I suggested that a major change in the environment (currently I think the pet theory is still an increase in oxygen) would have either necessitated or allowed for major changes organized by the intelligent cell communities of which all multicellular organisms are composed. I presume your theory is that a major change in the environment necessitated or allowed for major changes organized by God. Same process, different organizer. (NB my suggestion does not exclude God, who may have been the designer of cellular intelligence.)

https://phys.org/news/2020-03-ancestor-animals-australian-fossils.html

"The tiny, wormlike creature, named Ikaria wariootia, is the earliest bilaterian, or organism with a front and back, two symmetrical sides, and openings at either end connected by a gut.

***

"The development of bilateral symmetry was a critical step in the evolution of animal life, giving organisms the ability to move purposefully and a common, yet successful way to organize their bodies. A multitude of animals, from worms to insects to dinosaurs to humans, are organized around this same basic bilaterian body plan.

"Evolutionary biologists studying the genetics of modern animals predicted the oldest ancestor of all bilaterians would have been simple and small, with rudimentary sensory organs. Preserving and identifying the fossilized remains of such an animal was thought to be difficult, if not impossible.

***

"Scott Evans, a recent doctoral graduate from UC Riverside; and Mary Droser, a professor of geology, noticed miniscule, oval impressions near some of these burrows. With funding from a NASA exobiology grant, they used a three-dimensional laser scanner that revealed the regular, consistent shape of a cylindrical body with a distinct head and tail and faintly grooved musculature. The animal ranged between 2-7 millimeters long and about 1-2.5 millimeters wide, with the largest the size and shape of a grain of rice—just the right size to have made the burrows.

***

"'Burrows of Ikaria occur lower than anything else. It's the oldest fossil we get with this type of complexity," Droser said. "Dickinsonia and other big things were probably evolutionary dead ends. We knew that we also had lots of little things and thought these might have been the early bilaterians that we were looking for."

"In spite of its relatively simple shape, Ikaria was complex compared to other fossils from this period. It burrowed in thin layers of well-oxygenated sand on the ocean floor in search of organic matter, indicating rudimentary sensory abilities. The depth and curvature of Ikaria represent clearly distinct front and rear ends, supporting the directed movement found in the burrows.

"The burrows also preserve crosswise, "V"-shaped ridges, suggesting Ikaria moved by contracting muscles across its body like a worm, known as peristaltic locomotion. Evidence of sediment displacement in the burrows and signs the organism fed on buried organic matter reveal Ikaria probably had a mouth, anus, and gut."

Comment: As usual the Darwinists try to diminish the Cambrian gap. No way. The Cambrians are still light years more complex than these guys. Of course this stage had to be there.

https://phys.org/news/2020-02-mathematical-reveals-major-groups-evolution.html

"The origins of many major groups of organisms in the fossil record seem to lie shrouded in obscurity. Indeed, one of the most famous examples, the flowering plants, was called "an abominable mystery" by Darwin. Many modern groups appear abruptly, and their predecessors—if there are any—tend to be few in number and vanish quickly from the fossil record shortly afterwards. Conversely, once groups are established, they tend to be dominant for long periods of time until interrupted by the so-called "mass extinctions" such as the one at the end of the Cretaceous period some 66 million years ago.

"Such patterns appear surprising, and often seem to be contradicted by the results from "molecular clocks"—using calibrated rates of change of molecules found in living organisms to estimate when they started to diverge from each other. How can this conflict be resolved, and what can we learn from it?

"In a paper, Graham Budd, Uppsala University, and Richard Mann, University of Leeds, present a novel mathematical model for how the origin of modern groups based on a so-called "birth-death" process of speciation and extinction. Birth-death models show how random extinction and speciation events give rise to large-scale patterns of diversity through time. Budd and Mann show that the ancestral forms of modern groups are typically rather few in number, and once they give rise to the modern group, they can be expected to quickly go extinct. The modern group, conversely, tends to diversify very quickly and thus swamp out the ancestral forms. Thus, rather surprisingly, living organisms capture a great percentage of all the diversity there has ever been.

"The only exceptions to these patterns are caused by the "mass extinctions," of which there have been at least five throughout history, which can massively delay the origin of the modern group, and thus extend the longevity and the diversity of the ancestral forms, called "stem groups." A good example of this is the enormous diversity of the dinosaurs, which properly considered are stem-group birds. The meteorite impact at the end of the Cretaceous some 66 million years ago killed off nearly all of them, apart from a tiny group that survived and flourished to give rise to the more than 10,000 species of living birds.

"The new model explains many puzzling features about the fossil record and suggests that it often records a relatively accurate picture of the origin of major groups. This in turn suggests that increased scrutiny should be paid to molecular clock models when they significantly disagree with what the fossil record might be telling us."

Comment: All this article does is expose the problems about gaps and remind us the fossil record is to be trusted! Note my bold. Early types of hominin and early homo groups were few in number, and only sapiens grew in number and diversified quickly. Why? The very superior brain we were given solved problems quickly as new concepts were rapidly developed, once we learned to use it. It did not come with the advanced concepts builtin and early use was obviously quite simple. For example, modern Calculus is less than 350 years old, but there is much evidence of early approaches from 1,300 BC.

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2144518-antarctic-mystery-microbe-could-tell-us-wh...

"Biologists have puzzled for decades about where viruses come from. Are they an older, simpler form of life – or are they parasites that arose only once cells had evolved?

"Ricardo Cavicchioli of the University of New South Wales in Australia and his colleagues have found a microorganism in the lakes of the Rauer Islands off the coast of Antarctica that might shed some light on the question. The organism, which they named Halorubrum lacusprofundi R1S1, is an archaean: a kind of single-celled organism that looks like a bacterium, but actually belongs to a separate domain of life.

"The group knew that viruses often play an important role in Antarctic ecosystems, so team member Susanne Erdmann searched for viruses inside the organism’s cells. She found something unexpected: a plasmid.

"Plasmids are small fragments of DNA, often circular, that reside in living cells. They are not part of the cell’s main genome, and can replicate themselves independently. Often, a plasmid will carry a gene that is somehow useful to the cell: for instance, antibiotic resistance genes are sometimes found on plasmids.

"The plasmid Erdmann found, which the team calls “pR1SE”, is unusual. The genes it carries allow it to make vesicles – essentially bubbles made of lipids – that enclose it in a protective layer. Encased in its protective bubble, pR1SE can leave its host cell to seek out new hosts.

"In other words, pR1SE looks and acts a lot like a virus. But it carries genes that are found only on plasmids, and lacks any telltale virus genes. It is a plasmid with the attributes of a virus. “There really are no major distinctions left between plasmids and viruses,” says Cavicchioli.

"He suggests that viruses could have evolved from plasmids like pR1SE, by acquiring genes from their host that allowed them to make a hard capsid shell rather than a soft vesicle.
This lines up with existing evidence on the origin of viruses.

"There have been three leading ideas: either viruses originated before cells, or some cells evolved simpler forms and became viruses, or genes “escaped” from cells and became viruses. This third escape hypothesis has gathered support in recent years: in March 2017, a study suggested that many capsid proteins can be traced back to proteins found in cells.

"The evidence implies that such escapes began early in the history of life, says Patrick Forterre of the Pasteur Institute in Paris. “Traditionally the escape hypothesis has been associated with the idea that viruses are recent,” he says. “Now the escape hypothesis should be viewed in a broader context.” The first viruses may have escaped from some of the first cells on Earth."

Comment: Interesting. An other domain of early life. Doesn't help explain the origin of life but does point to an origin for viruses.

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2141777-see-inside-the-580-million-year-old-creatu...

"Now, CT scans of a pair of unusual three-dimensional fossils found in Namibia are telling us more about the mysterious organisms. The two fossils are from a single 10-centimetre-tall Ediacaran species called Rangea. It is a member of an Ediacaran group called the rangeomorphs that looked a bit like large petals.

***

"From an initial examination of the same fossil in 2013, Sharp’s colleagues concluded that its six fern-like fronds looked like flat fins protruding out at equal distances from a central axis, like a starfruit with six segments.

"The new analysis updates that description. The scans shows that one of the three fronds had a three-dimensional shape, more like an inflated balloon than a flat fin. The other two fronds are flatter, but probably only because they were squashed during fossilisation.

"Sharp and her colleagues think all six fronds may have been inflated like long balloons. They may even have touched one another – meaning that a horizontal section through Rangea would have looked more like a slice through an orange rather than one through a starfruit.
“Our work supports a lifestyle of absorption of nutrients through membranes inflated to the maximum, increasing the surface area across which these organisms seemed to feed,” says Sharp.

"The CT scans also confirm that Rangea had a cone-shaped channel running up its central trunk. The lower part of this channel seems to be filled with sediment of a different composition from the sediment filling the rest of the fossil. Sharp says it was probably present in Rangea even when the organism was alive, helping to support the creature like a primitive skeleton.

“'These beautiful, three-dimensional Ediacaran fossils are comparatively rare,” says Jennifer Hoyal Cuthill at the University of Cambridge. “There’s still so much to discover about what these creatures were and how they lived, and detailed information on their anatomy is very valuable.”

"However, even with these new insights, it is still unclear what the Ediacarans were. “They may or may not be animals – we can’t say from this study,” says Sharp. “But they are the first of the truly large, multicellular organisms that radiated broadly before the first true animals evolved.'”

Comment: These very simple organisms lived At the bottom of seas just prior to the appearance of the earliest complex Cambrian organisms. A huge gap in form and function still exists at this point in the past. Darwin hoped it would be explained as it was exactly opposite to his theory of a gradualism type of evolution. Gradualism at any point in evolution has never been found.

https://phys.org/news/2017-07-big-shape-shifting-animals-dawn.html

"Why did life on Earth change from small to large when it did? Researchers from the University of Cambridge and the Tokyo Institute of Technology have determined how some of the first large organisms, known as rangeomorphs, were able to grow up to two metres in height, by changing their body size and shape as they extracted nutrients from their surrounding environment.

"The results, reported in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution, could also help explain how life on Earth, which once consisted only of microscopic organisms, changed so that huge organisms like dinosaurs and blue whales could ultimately evolve.

"Rangeomorphs were some of the earliest large organisms on Earth, existing during a time when most other forms of life were microscopic in size. Some rangeomorphs were only a few centimetres in height, while others were up to two metres tall.

"These organisms were ocean dwellers that lived during the Ediacaran period, between 635 and 541 million years ago. Their soft bodies were made up of branches, each with many smaller side branches, forming a geometric shape known as a fractal, which can be seen today in things like lungs, ferns and snowflakes.

"Since rangeomorphs don't resemble any modern organism, it's difficult to understand how they fed, grew or reproduced, let alone how they might link with any modern group. However, although they look somewhat like plants, scientists believe that they may have been some of the earliest animals to live on Earth.

***

"Their analysis shows the earliest evidence for nutrient-dependent growth in the fossil record. All organisms need nutrients to survive and grow, but nutrients can also dictate body size and shape. This is known as 'ecophenotypic plasticity.' Hoyal Cuthill and her co-author Professor Simon Conway Morris suggest that rangeomorphs not only show a strong degree of ecophenotypic plasticity, but that this provided a crucial advantage in a dramatically changing world. For example, rangeomorphs could rapidly "shape-shift", growing into a long, tapered shape if the seawater above them happened to have elevated levels of oxygen.

"During the Ediacaran, there seem to have been major changes in the Earth's oceans, which may have triggered growth, so that life on Earth suddenly starts getting much bigger," said Hoyal Cuthill. "It's probably too early to conclude exactly which geochemical changes in the Ediacaran oceans were responsible for the shift to large body sizes, but there are strong contenders, especially increased oxygen, which animals need for respiration."

"This change in ocean chemistry followed a large-scale ice age known as the Gaskiers glaciation. When nutrient levels in the ocean were low, they appear to have kept body sizes small. But with a geologically sudden increase in oxygen or other nutrients, much larger body sizes become possible, even in organisms with the same genetic makeup. This means that the sudden appearance of rangeomorphs at large size could have been a direct result of major changes in climate and ocean chemistry.

"However, while rangeomorphs were highly suited to their Ediacaran environment, conditions in the oceans continued to change and from about 541 million years ago the 'Cambrian Explosion' began - a period of rapid evolutionary development when most major animal groups first appeared in the fossil record. When the conditions changed, the rangeomorphs were doomed and nothing quite like them has been seen since.

Comment: They look like a dead end branch of evolution. The Cambrian gap continues and damages Darwin's theory.

"Nothing could be more evident than that whatever happens under the name of natural selection must arise within the “natural history of life.” The phrase “natural selection” adds nothing at all to this reality. What it does do, with its connotations of agency, is make it easy to project certain philosophical prejudices upon the pattern — for example, the belief that we are looking at a blind evolutionary mechanism acting upon machine-organisms and capable, with remarkable facility, of creating the observed diversity of life.

***

" natural selection represents nothing other than the pattern of living activities within shifting environments. As an abstraction, it cannot even work with this pattern; it is just another name for it.

"We can now understand why the “two” problems of teleology — evolutionary origins and present functioning — are so readily conflated. Evolution is not a separate force or mechanism accounting for the origin of this or that feature of the pattern of life. It is that pattern, and the pattern alone bears the story of how organisms evolve new features. We understand life by studying life, not by picturing a vague mechanism capable of directing its course. There is no separate or second story. This is why the invocation of natural selection to explain the presence or functioning of teleological features ends up assuming, rather than explaining, the features under consideration. The attempt at a second story simply dissolves back into the only story there is.

***

"Having inherited mind and matter as the incommensurable products of Descartes’s cleaving stroke, the scientist today rightly concludes that something is badly awry. But, rather than going back and undoing that fateful stroke in order to find a different way forward, he meekly accepts both mind and matter from Descartes’s hand, and then decides he can be rid of the contradiction between them only by throwing away one of them.

"And so not only is the world badly riven, but essential aspects of its nature are discarded. Form as a causal principle disappears from view, and any attempt at acknowledging it is likely to be condemned as an appeal to vital forces or to discredited ancient philosophy. At the same time, attempts to explain form mechanistically end up being circular, since the form one is trying to explain also appears in the explanation.

***

"The attempt to sustain the materialistic view based on a single half of the crudely dichotomized Cartesian world is a sickness from which contemporary thought cannot seem to free itself. Yet biologists, like all scientists, inevitably acknowledge an undivided world in one way or another. This is why the organism’s well-directed forming and organizing activities provide the very principles by which biologists themselves define relevant fields of inquiry. Cells must divide, proteins must be synthesized, signals must be sent, received, and interpreted — all depending on local contexts and the needs of the organism as a whole. If the researcher does not have a well-formed narrative — an end-directed achievement — to investigate, he does not have a biological project, as opposed to a chemical or physical one.

***

"According to the late William Provine, a distinguished historian of biology and contributor to theoretical population genetics, “naturalistic evolution has clear consequences that Charles Darwin understood perfectly.” In particular: “No gods worth having exist; no life after death exists; no ultimate foundation for ethics exists; no ultimate meaning in life exists.” These conclusions, Provine claimed, “are so obvious to modern naturalistic evolutionists” that they require little defense.

"Provine’s remark testifies to a science that has slipped its empirical moorings, unaware of its own biologically unsecured pretensions. Such unawareness is probably a prerequisite for his grandiose metaphysical pronouncements upon gods, death, ethics, and meaning. A similar unawareness seems to accompany the explanations of teleology we have heard.

"Evolution-based pronouncements have somehow become far too easy. When theorists can lightly pretend to have risen above the most enduring mysteries of life, making claims supposedly too obvious to require defense, then even questions central to evolution itself tend to disappear in favor of reigning prejudices. What is life? How can we understand the striving of organisms to sustain their own lives — a striving that seems altogether hidden to conventional modes of understanding? What makes for the integral unity and compelling “personality” of the living creature, and how can this personified unity be understood if we’re thinking in purely material and machine-like terms? Does it make sense to dismiss as illusory the compelling appearance of intelligent and intentional agency in organisms?

"It is evident enough that the answers to such questions could crucially alter even our most basic assumptions about evolution. But we have no answers. In the current theoretical milieu, we don’t even have the questions. What we do have is the seemingly miraculous agency of natural selection, substituting for the only agency we ever actually witness in nature, which is the agency of living beings."

Comment: Living organisms are more than DNA as a simple protein-producing code. Evolution and consciousness are not explained by materialistic science. Read the whole essay

http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/evolution-and-the-purposes-of-life

"Being “endowed with a purpose or project,” wrote biochemist Jacques Monod, is “essential to the very definition of living beings.” And according to Theodosius Dobzhansky, a geneticist and leading architect of the past century’s dominant evolutionary theory, “It would make no sense to talk of the purpose of adaptation of stars, mountains, or the laws of physics,” but “adaptedness of living beings is too obvious to be overlooked.... Living beings have an internal, or natural, teleology.”

***

"The idea of teleological behavior within a world of meaning is rather uncomfortable for scientists committed — as contemporary biologists overwhelmingly are — to what they call “materialism” or “naturalism.” The discomfort has to do with the apparent inward aspect of the goal-directed behavior described above — behavior that depends upon the apprehension of a meaningful world and that is easily associated with our own conscious and apparently immaterial perceptions, reasonings, and motivations to act.

***

"All biological activity, even at the molecular level, can be characterized as purposive and goal-directed. As a cell grows and divides, it marshals its molecular and structural resources with a remarkably skillful “wisdom.” It also demonstrates a well-directed, “willful” persistence in adjusting to disturbances. Everything leads toward fulfillment of the organism’s evident “purposes.”

***

"As the Chilean neuroscientist and philosopher of biology Francisco Varela wrote: “The answer to the question of what status teleology should have in biology decides about the character of our whole theory of animate nature.”

"My own sense of the matter is that the question has yet to be fairly taken up within the core disciplines of biology. What appears certain is that as yet we have no secure answer to it. Even more important is what seems least recognized: to the degree that we lack understanding of the organism’s purposive life we also lack a respectable foundation for evolutionary theory.

***

"While DNA and its genes have been advertised as containing a program that explains the directive life of the organism, they appear to be not so much an explanation as an expression of that life. This emerges more clearly when we take a closer look at the performances in which DNA is caught up.

***

" The last decade, they say, has taught us that “gene expression is not merely controlled by the information contained in the DNA sequence,” but also by “higher-order” interactions and the features of nuclear organization and context.

"What this shows is that the idea of a DNA code with “controlling information” is a one-sided caricature. We are looking not at a code but at a play of animated cellular substance caught up in meaningful form. The moment-by-moment outcomes look more like balletic expression than like the results of a digital logic.

***

"The mechanistic, programmed organism is a deception. It turns out that nothing is controlled in the required way. The relevant processes — generally involving trillions of diffusible molecules making their way in a watery medium — remain “on track” only because the organism, as a unified center of agency, is being-at-work-staying-itself. It is wisely coordinating, redirecting, revising, and sustaining the overall form and coherence of countless interactions, including all those interactions involving what once was thought to be the explanatory program.

***

" Darwin’s biology does not deny — rather, it reaffirms — the immanent teleology displayed in the striving of each living being to fulfill its specific ends.... Reproduction, growth, feeding, healing, courtship, parental care for the young — these and many other activities of organisms are goal-directed.”

***

"Whatever role we imagine natural selection to play in generating functional adaptations such as hands and eyes, it does not account for the fact of end-directed behavior, which is inseparable from the fact of life itself. It relies on all the fundamental living activities that must already have been displayed in the very first organisms available for selection.

***

"All this usefully underscores a still more general problem — and source of perennial abuse — in evolutionary theory. At least part of the reason so many can easily imagine natural selection doing things to transform our understanding of teleology is that they can so easily imagine natural selection as an agent capable of doing things.

***

"The frequent references, in the literature, to the “mechanism of selection” bear witness to the beguiling influence of the term “natural selection,” which seems to refer to an act, or at least a function, of some specific power. “Natural selection” is a historical pattern, not a mechanism; (continued)

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/next/evolution/new-fossils-push-back-earliest-single-celle...

"According to research published last week, life has been making its own hard parts for at least 810 million years, about 200 million years longer than previously thought. It’s the first occurrence of what scientists call biomineralization, and it could give us deeper insight into both the evolution of living things and Earth’s early climate.

***

"Cohen was in the Yukon studying microfossils from a 200-foot-thick section of lime, mudstone, and slate, and she suspected that they could have been formed by biological processes. These microfossils were originally discovered in the 1980s, when they were dated to the Neoproterozoic Era, about 250 million years prior to the Cambrian explosion. But scientists at the time were unable to determine the exact age of the fossils, nor were they able to discern whether they were crafted by geology or life itself.

***

"The minerals possibly served as an armor-like casing constructed by now-extinct organisms, though Cohen and her team did not find conclusive evidence of their function, nor did they find remnants of the cells themselves, which rarely preserve for so long. Cohen said these parts could have been a defense against a predation, since some single-celled organisms today use hard parts for protection. Plus, evidence in the fossil record suggests that predatory single-celled organisms would have existed at the same time as Cohen’s fossils.

"Shuhai Xiao, a paleobiologist at Virginia Tech who did not contribute to the paper, said it’s a reasonable hypothesis. “Organisms don’t make something just because there is material available,” Xiao said. “There must also be an ecological need.”

***

"The analysis also revealed that the minerals were composed of a particular flavor of phosphorus called hydroxylapatite, which is rarely found in oceanic single-celled organisms today. Cohen and her team found evidence in the rocks suggesting that the oceans at the time contained less oxygen than today. This provided a suitable environment for elevated phosphorus concentrations, which may have helped spur its use in biomineralization.

“'Hydroxylapatite is not very stable, so the preservation of the mineral in rocks of this age is remarkable,” Xiao said.

"The team was able to constrain the age of the fossils to an unusually narrow time-frame – 810 million years ago, give or take about 6 million years. As a result, Cohen thinks she’ll be able to find more fossils because she will only have to search a much narrower slice of the fossil record than before. “I was looking through a hundred million years of time before, and now I’m looking through ten million years,” she said.

***

"The new study leaves a few questions unanswered, and poses a few new ones of its own. For one, biomineralization has evolved several different times. This study illustrates how one branch of life gained the ability to make skeletal parts, but there are still several others to puzzle out. And then it blasts open a period of more than 200 million years in which scientists so far have found no evidence of biomineralization, a range of time that Cohen points out is as wide as that between the present day and the dawn of the dinosaurs.

“'We’re seeing a little bit of a mystery there,” Cohen said of the gap. They will now try to pinpoint when the shift from using phosphorus to using carbon occurred and find out what, if anything, organisms were making during that time. “That’s the big open question,” Cohen said."

Comment: Biomineralization certainly occurred in the Cambrian era starting 540 million years ago. What is found 810 million years ago is a very simple precursor, simpler than the Ediacarans which preceded the Cambrians.

dhw: Of course you think that anyone who agrees with you has the right approach. You have no way of knowing if something that appears sentient is or is not sentient (plus cognitive, plus decision-making), and therefore at the very least you should respect Shapiro’s conclusions.

I have reviewed Shapiro's findings and am allowed to reach my own conclusions as to what they mean. I've done this all throughout scientific findings.

I am aware that your concept of saltations requires future planning, and am also aware that after much vacillation you decided that your God’s powers were not limited. Now apparently he is incapable of intervening (“dabbling”) in order to restructure organisms in response to environmental changes (i.e. without advanced planning). There is no consistency in your arguments.

Another misinterpretation. A mind can look at the future, conceive of what is desired, and plan for it with time or in some cases rather instantaneously if the change is simple. God's mind can do it all. Coming down from trees requires structural changes to the skeleton. Must be planned. Entering an aquatic lifestyle has the same requirements. All saltations are large gaps in the fossil record, and must be planned.

dhw: I have no problem with faith, but I do have a problem if someone claims that blind faith in a senseless theory is logical.

Senseless to you.

Of course you think that anyone who agrees with you has the right approach. You have no way of knowing if something that appears sentient is or is not sentient (plus cognitive, plus decision-making), and therefore at the very least you should respect Shapiro’s conclusions.

DAVID: Saltations are large changes in form and function. There is no way to create them with coordination of function without advanced planning. You may imagine it, but I view it as impossible.
dhw: You agreed on June 30...that your God could produce saltations at any time without advanced planning, but by July 1 it is impossible, even for God.
DAVID: I just expanded on my concept of saltations for your edification. Pre-planning is always required and I assumed you would understand that from my previous explanations of understanding the implications of the future forms and functions.

I am aware that your concept of saltations requires future planning, and am also aware that after much vacillation you decided that your God’s powers were not limited. Now apparently he is incapable of intervening (“dabbling”) in order to restructure organisms in response to environmental changes (i.e. without advanced planning). There is no consistency in your arguments.

dhw: The fact that you have blind faith in your hypothesis is no more of a justification for it than Dawkins announcing his blind faith that random mutations and natural selection explain the whole of life.
DAVID: So be it. I view my conclusions as logical.
dhw: Earlier quotes: “If it’s God’s method, it does not have to make sense” and “It doesn’t have to make sense if one is blindly faithful.” But despite the fact that your theory doesn’t make sense and you must rely on blind faith, you regard it as logical.
DAVID: That's faith for you!

I have no problem with faith, but I do have a problem if someone claims that blind faith in a senseless theory is logical.

dhw: I don't know why ID scientists should be regarded as having a monopoly on the truth. In any case, do they really agree with your 3.8 billion-year-old divine computer programme for the whole of evolution? And if Shapiro is their favourite as well as yours, why would they and you resolutely dismiss his belief that cells are sentient, cognitive, decision-making beings?

I think they have the right approach to biological truth. they can make some DNA changes, hat is all which appear sentient, but are not.

DAVID: Saltations are large changes in form and function. There is no way to create them with coordination of function without advanced planning. You may imagine it, but I view it as impossible.

dhw: You agreed on June 30, as above, that your God could produce saltations at any time without advanced planning, but by July 1 it is impossible, even for God.

I just expanded on my concept of saltations for your edification. Pre-planning is always required and I assumed you would understand that from my previous explanations of understanding the implications of the future forms and functions.

dhw: The fact that you have blind faith in your hypothesis is no more of a justification for it than Dawkins announcing his blind faith that random mutations and natural selection explain the whole of life.
DAVID: So be it. I view my conclusions as logical.

dhw: Earlier quotes: “If it’s God’s method, it does not have to make sense” and “It doesn’t have to make sense if one is blindly faithful.” But despite the fact that your theory doesn’t make sense and you must rely on blind faith, you regard it as logical.

That's faith for you!