Missing Trunk 1
The “evolutionary tree” has no trunk. In what evolutionists call the earliest part of the fossil record (generally the lowest sedimentary layers of Cambrian rock), life appears suddenly, full-blown, complex, diversified (a), and dispersed—worldwide (b).
a. “There is another and allied difficulty, which is much more serious. I allude to the manner in which species belonging to several of the main divisions of the animal kingdom suddenly appear in the lowest known fossiliferous rocks.” Darwin, The Origin of Species, p. 348.
“The abrupt manner in which whole groups of species suddenly appear in certain formations, has been urged by several palaeontologists—for instance, by Agassiz, Pictet, and Sedgwick—as a fatal objection to the belief in the transmutation of 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.” Ibid., p. 344.
“To the question why we do not find rich fossiliferous deposits belonging to these assumed earliest periods prior to the Cambrian system, I can give no satisfactory answer.” Ibid., p. 350.
“The case at present must remain inexplicable, and may be truly urged as a valid argument against the views here entertained.” Ibid., p. 351.
“The most famous such burst, the Cambrian explosion, marks the inception of modern multicellular life. Within just a few million years, nearly every major kind of animal anatomy appears in the fossil record for the first time...The Precambrian record is now sufficiently good that the old rationale about undiscovered sequences of smoothly transitional forms will no longer wash.” Stephen Jay Gould, “An Asteroid to Die For,” Discover, October 1989, p. 65.
“And we find many of them [Cambrian fossils] 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. Needless to say, this appearance of sudden planting has delighted creationists.” Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker (London: W.W. Norton & Company, 1987), p. 229.
Richard Monastersky, “Mysteries of the Orient,” Discover, April 1993, pp. 38–48.
[From “In the Beginning” by Walt Brown]
