Cambrian “Explosion”—Or “Slow Fuse”? 179Only after several more steps do we see the full Cambrian fauna. In short, the fossil record shows
a gradual buildup from single-celled prokaryotes and then eukaryotes to multicellular soft-
bodied animals to animals with tiny shells, and finally by the middle Cambrian, the full range
of large shelled invertebrates. This gradual transformation by logical advances in body size
and skeletonization bears no resemblance to an instantaneous Cambrian explosion that might
be consistent with the Bible but instead clearly shows a series of evolutionary transformations.
All of this information has been known for at least the past few decades, and the first
Precambrian microfossils were discovered over 70 years ago. They are published in all the
standard geology and paleontology textbooks and have been for decades. But the creationists
either don’t want to know or cannot understand the implications of these discoveries. Their
out-of-context quotations of real scientists puzzling about the Cambrian explosion are all
from old sources that do not reflect what we have learned from recent discoveries. Even their
most recent books, including the “intelligent design” texts, persist in perpetuating this out-
of-date picture. A few years ago, I debated an ID creationist on the KPCC radio station in Los
Angeles, and as soon as he mentioned the Cambrian explosion, it was clear he didn’t know
anything about paleontology and hadn’t heard that the Cambrian explosion was a myth.
In 2013, ID creationist Stephen Meyer published an entire book on the topic enti-
tled Darwin’s Doubt: The Explosive Origin of Animal Life and the Case for Intelligent Design.
FIGURE 7.5. Examples of the extraordinary soft-bodied middle Cambrian fauna from the Burgess Shale, near
Field, British Columbia. Note the exquisite preservation of fine detail, including appendages and other soft
tissues. (Photos courtesy of the Smithsonian Institution)