180 Evolution? The Fossils Say YES!
Most scientists ignored it, but the few who wasted their time reading it lambasted it (Cook
2013; Marshall 2013). As I wrote in my own review (Prothero 2013), the book is a piece of
incompetent scholarship from one end to the other, with mistakes, misstatements, quote
mining, cherry-picking of data, ignoring inconvenient facts, and outright lies about the fos-
sil record in nearly every page. This is not surprising, since Meyer has no formal training
in paleontology (his Ph.D. is in history of science), and no published research in paleontol-
ogy, so everything he cites comes across as amateurish and filtered by his creationist biases.
There is no space in this short chapter to list all the errors and lies in his book (for details, see
Prothero 2013). The most crucial deception that Meyer pulls is that he completely ignores
the first two stages of the Cambrian! Nowhere in the book are the “little shellies” or the
Nemakit-Dalydinian or Tommotian stages even mentioned! Naturally, if you deliberately
leave out the crucial evidence of the intermediate stage of life evolving from large soft-bodied
Ediacarans (which he dismisses as irrelevant because we’re not sure they are members of
modern phyla) to the large shelly trilobites of the third stage of the Cambrian (Atdabanian),
it will look more explosive. I even debated him on this topic in Hollywood in 2009, and he
dodged the issue entirely, so it cannot be a case of him not knowing any better. No, he’s fully
aware that this evidence would invalidate his entire book, so he ignores it—and he counts
on his readers to not know the difference.
Even if we grant the premise that a lot of phyla appear in the Atdabanian (solely because
there are no soft-bodied faunas older than Chengjiang in the earliest Cambrian), Meyer
claims the 5–6 million years of the Atdabanian are too fast for evolution to produce all the
phyla of animals. Wrong again! Lieberman (2003) showed that rates of evolution during the
“Cambrian explosion” are typical of any adaptive radiation in life’s history, whether you
look at the Paleocene diversification of the mammals after the nonavian dinosaurs vanished,
or even the diversification of humans from their common ancestor with apes 6 million years
ago. As distinguished Harvard paleontologist Andrew Knoll put it in his book, Life on a
Young Planet (also cited in the epigraph to this section), it wasn’t an “explosion,” nor was it
“cartoonishly fast.”
Finally, one might wonder: what’s all the fuss about the “Cambrian explosion”? Why
should it matter whether evolution was fast or slow during the third stage of the Cambrian?
Some scientists might find this puzzling, but you must understand the minds of creationists.
They operate by a god of the gaps argument: anything that is currently not easily explained
by science is automatically attributed to supernatural causes. Even though ID creationists say
that this supernatural designer could be any deity or even extraterrestrials, it is well docu-
mented that they are thinking of the Judeo-Christian god when they point to the complexity
and “design” of life. They argue that if scientists haven’t completely explained every possible
event of the early Cambrian, science has failed and we must consider supernatural causes.
Again and again, creationists persist in presenting a version of the Cambrian that is at
least 70 years out of date either because they don’t know any better (the “clueless” hypoth-
esis) or because they do know better (the “deceiver” hypothesis, of which Meyer is a good
example). Either way, it is bad science.
For Further Reading
Ayala, F. J., and A. Rzhetsky. 1998. Origins of the metazoan phyla: molecular clocks confirm paleonto-
logical estimates. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 95:606–611.