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Word Gems 

exploring self-realization, sacred personhood, and full humanity

 

Dr. Stephen C. Meyer's
Darwin's Doubt

An Investigation of the 'Cambrian Explosion'

What gave Darwin pause
and reason to doubt?

 
 

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Editor's note: The following information is from chapter one of Darwin's Doubt.

 

Dr. Stephen C. Meyer

 

From Charles Darwin's Origin Of Species:

“The difficulty of understanding the absence of vast piles of fossiliferous strata, which, on my theory, were no doubt somewhere, accumulated before the Silurian [a term later changed to “Cambrian”] epoch, is very great.”

“I allude to the manner in which numbers of species of the same group suddenly appear in the lowest known fossiliferous rocks.”

“The earliest signs of living things, announcing as they do, a high complexity of organization, entirely exclude the hypothesis of a transmutation from lower to higher grades of being.”

 

In other words, how can a theory of gradualism be taken seriously when the actual facts embodied in the fossil record indicate something else? – a sudden coming into existence of a great variety of new species; some of which were not so simple, but quite sophisticated, offering abilities beyond that which many animals, including humans, today, would love to possess.

 

 

Editor's last word:

Notice Darwin’s circular reasoning: The earlier, less complicated, intermediate species “were no doubt somewhere”!

And why are we certain that they must be “somewhere”? Because this is a kangaroo court, and we’ve already decided what the answer has to be, even before, or in spite of, the evidence. It’s called “shooting an arrow into the wall and painting a bulls-eye around it.”