The Barbarian wrote: ↑Sat Feb 26, 2022 4:52 pm
You wrote:
Many of the phyla had hard shells too, so we'd expect to see ancestors with hard shells but we do not.
I corrected that misconception:
"You're wrong about that, too...
The Precambrian-Cambrian transition (just prior to the Cambrian Explosion) is characterized by the appearance of small shelly fossils that are called the Tommotian fauna after the area of Siberia where they were first discovered. These small shelly animals were millimeters in size and represent the first appearance of diverse skeletal material in the fossil record, some 10 million years before the first trilobites appear in the fossil record. This fauna that existed some 530 million years ago is of essential evolutionary importance in that these are the oldest known metazoans (animals) that had mineralized (skeletal) hard parts, and thus are the probable ascendants to the many phyla of the Cambrian Explosion. They appear in the late Ediacaran Period, close to 550 million years ago, and some 20 million years before the soft tissue Ediacaran Biota. Their fossil remains are found throughout the world, so their radiation must have been extensive. They persisted into the early Cambrian, and have been discovered in trilobite fossil beds.
http://www.fossilmuseum.net/Paleobiolog ... _fauna.htm
There's a lot more you never learned about this time in Earth's history. Maybe it's time to go and find out?"
You continued:
THINK about this, if we find fossils of already well differentiated hard shelled animals (so differentiated that they are classified as distinct phyla) then there must have been earlier hard shelled ancestors too so where's the evidence? To have several phyla (very differentiated morphologies) means that there must have been a significant evolutionary history if they evolved.
See above. You just didn't check for yourself. I realize you're not a biologist or a paleontologist. But the evidence isn't hard to find.
You wrote:
Why do you think paleontologists refer to this as the Cambrian "explosion"? did you really never ask yourself that?
I showed you about that, too:
"They simply didn't know about the Ediacaran fauna. But now they do. So there was some talk that the sudden diversification that happened when full-body shells evolved should not be considered an "explosion", but it was always an informal term anyway and still has some meaning, if not the meaning it once had. Now, you've learned rather a lot just now, let it sink in, make a few notes and just reach out if you'd like more help with any of this, there are several books and other resources I think you'd find helpful. You might try Stephen Gould's essay Is the Cambrian Explosion a Sigmoid Fraud?"
By now, I think you're starting to realize it's really hard arguing with someone who actually knows the subject, when you're apparently getting your stuff second-hand from someone who doesn't know much more than you do.
And you're still unwilling to show us anything in Darwin's four points that is falsified by any evidence whatever. As you learned when I showed you about the evolution of eukaryotes from prokaryotes, the evidence for that transition is well-documented from a number of sources. If you can come up with anything that shows the evolution of endosymbiosis is impossible, now would be a good time for you to show us what you have.
Good Lord, you refer to "These small shelly animals were millimeters in size" as being an ancestor of something as big as a pigeon? To show that these were ancestors is a serious challenge.
First they show that fossils from before the larger Cambrian fauna, were preserved, conditions were conducive to fossilization yet curiously we see
no evidence of ancestry between Tommotian fossils and later Cambrian, each possessed shelly parts, each was preserved yet oddly nothing in between.
You are seriously expecting us to believe that these:
"evolved" into these:
and left
no trace of what must have been millions of intermediate forms, (each of which must have had shelly parts - likely to be preserved)? An organism 1 cubic mm in volume "evolved" into an organism some half a million times more voluminous and all we have are these as evidence of that claim? Add to that too, that trilobites are just one of hundreds of Cambrian animals (30+ phyla remember) and not a single one left a trace of any lineage at all? really?
See! this is the blinkered wishful thinking of the evolution devotee, the absolutely ludicrous claim needs no evidence though, why should it when we already know that evolution is true!
What's worse they even berate the skeptic, someone who finds it hard to accept that former "developed" into the latter (without leaving evidence) is not treated as being reasonably justified in that skepticism, no, they are ridiculed and attacked accused of being science numpties and so on, the unbeliever is simply not to be tolerated.
The fact is the absence of these "intermediates" is itself evidence, strong evidence that they never actually existed, sorry if this rocks your world but
facts are facts, this falsifies the "theory".
Seriously if this the "evidence" that the Cambrian animals evolved, science really is in serious trouble.
I said it above and I'll say it to you again -
THINK man.
