Disparity preceding Diversity graphic on Cambrian Explosion from ‘Darwin’s Doubt’ evolutionnews.org/2013/07/its_darwins_dou074341.html As Whittington analyzed the Cambrian fauna at the Burgess [in the 1960s], he realized that Walcott (before 1917) had grossly underestimated the morphological disparity of this group of animals. Many of the creatures in the assemblage featured unique body designs, unique anatomical structures, or both. Opabinia, with its five eyes, fifteen distinct segments, and claw at the end of a long proboscis exemplified the unique forms on display at the Burgess. But so did Hallucigenia, Wiwaxia, Nectocaris, and many other Burgess animals. To this day, paleontologists describing Nectocaris, for example, can’t decide whether it more closely resembles an arthropod, a chordate, or a cephalopod (a class of mollusk). Stephen Meyer - Darwins Doubt (pp. 52–53). Challenging Fossil of a Little Fish In Chen’s view, his evidence supports a history of life that runs opposite to the standard evolutionary tree diagrams, a progression he calls top-down evolution. Jun-Yuan Chen is professor at the Nanjing Institute of Paleontology and Geology fredheeren/boston.htm Investigating Evolution: The Cambrian Explosion Part 1 – video youtube/watch?v=4DkbmuRhXRY Part 2 – video youtube/watch?v=iZFM48XIXnk The Ham-Nye Creation Debate: A Huge Missed Opportunity - Casey Luskin - February 4, 2014 Excerpt: The record of the first appearance of living phyla, classes, and orders can best be described in Wrights (1) term as from the top down. (James W. Valentine, Late Precambrian bilaterians: Grades and clades, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, 91: 6751-6757 (July 1994).) evolutionnews.org/2014/02/the_ham-nye_deb081911.html In Explaining the Cambrian Explosion, Has the TalkOrigins Archive Resolved Darwins Dilemma? - JonathanM - May 2012 Excerpt: it is the pattern of morphological disparity preceding diversity that is fundamentally at odds with the neo-Darwinian scenario of gradualism. All of the major differences (i.e. the higher taxonomic categories such as phyla) appear first in the fossil record and then the lesser taxonomic categories such as classes, orders, families, genera and species appear later. On the Darwinian view, one would expect to see all of the major differences in body plan appear only after numerous small-scale speciation events. But this is not what we observe. evolutionnews.org/2012/05/has_the_talk-or059171.html The sweep of anatomical diversity reached a maximum right after the initial diversification of multicellular animals. The later history of life proceeded by elimination not expansion. Stephen J. Gould, Harvard, Wonderful Life, 1989, p.46 Darwins evolutionary theory would have us believe that we should have more phyla today due to ongoing evolutionary processes. These following timeline graphs highlight the loss of phyla through time: Origin of Phyla - The Fossil Evidence - Timeline Graph lutheranscience.org/images/GraphC2.gif docs.google/Doc?docid=0AYmaSrBPNEmGZGM4ejY3d3pfMzNobjlobjNncQ&hl=en The unscientific hegemony of uniformitarianism - David Tyler - May 2011 Excerpt: The pervasive pattern of natural history: disparity precedes diversity,,,, The summary of results for phyla is as follows. The pattern reinforces earlier research that concluded the Explosion is not an artefact of sampling. Much the same finding applies to the appearance of classes. These data are presented in Figures 1 and 2 in the paper. arn.org/blogs/index.php/literature/2011/05/16/the_unscientific_hegemony_of_uniformitar Disparity precedes diversity - graph veritas-ucsb.org/library/battson/images/G.gif Creation and Evolution: The Biological Evidence - Dr. Marc Surtees - Disparity precedes Diversity - video (7:20 minute mark) youtube/watch?v=_HT70ltbkQo&feature=player_detailpage#t=402s “Darwin had a lot of trouble with the fossil record because if you look at the record of phyla in the rocks as fossils why when they first appear we already see them all. The phyla are fully formed. It’s as if the phyla were created first and they were modified into classes and we see that the number of classes peak later than the number of phyla and the number of orders peak later than that. So it’s kind of a top down succession, you start with this basic body plans, the phyla, and you diversify them into classes, the major sub-divisions of the phyla, and these into orders and so on. So the fossil record is kind of backwards from what you would expect from in that sense from what you would expect from Darwin’s ideas. James W. Valentine - as quoted from On the Origin of Phyla: Interviews with James W. Valentine - video arn.org/arnproducts/php/video_show_item.php?id=7 Disparity preceding diversity is not only found in the Cambrian Explosion but is found after it as well. In fact, in the following paper, some Darwinists tried to argue that since Disparity preceding Diversity is a consistent pattern in the fossil record after the Cambrian Explosion then, by their reasoning, that means the Cambrian Explosion wasn’t that special after all: Cambrian Explosion Solved? - October 2010 Excerpt: Looking at the big picture, though, they argued that the Cambrian explosion was really not all that special; other parts of the fossil record show similar patterns: “the observation that disparity reaches its peak early in a group’s history seems to reflect a general phenomenon, also observed in plants (Boyce, 2005), the Ediacara biota (Shen et al., 2008), Precambrian microfossils (Huntley et al., 2006), and within many individual animal clades, such as crinoids (Foote, 1997), gastropods (Wagner, 1995), and ungulates (Jernvall et al., 1996). Although of significant interest, this high disparity soon after a group’s appearance is not unique to the Cambrian,” they said. creationsafaris/crev201010.htm#20101031a Well, despite what the preceding researchers would like to believe, Disparity preceding Diversity is NOT what Darwinian Evolution predicts (But such a pattern is what ‘top down’ design predicts): Scientific study turns understanding about evolution on its head - July 30, 2013 Excerpt: evolutionary biologists,,, looked at nearly one hundred fossil groups to test the notion that it takes groups of animals many millions of years to reach their maximum diversity of form. Contrary to popular belief, not all animal groups continued to evolve fundamentally new morphologies through time. The majority actually achieved their greatest diversity of form (disparity) relatively early in their histories. ,,,Dr Matthew Wills said: This pattern, known as early high disparity, turns the traditional V-shaped cone model of evolution on its head. What is equally surprising in our findings is that groups of animals are likely to show early-high disparity regardless of when they originated over the last half a billion years. This isnt a phenomenon particularly associated with the first radiation of animals (in the Cambrian Explosion), or periods in the immediate wake of mass extinctions.,,, Author Martin Hughes, continued: Our work implies that there must be constraints on the range of forms within animal groups, and that these limits are often hit relatively early on. Co-author Dr Sylvain Gerber, added: A key question now is what prevents groups from generating fundamentally new forms later on in their evolution.,,, phys.org/news/2013-07-scientific-evolution.html “The point emerges that if we examine the fossil record in detail, whether at the level of orders or of species, we find’ over and over again’ not gradual evolution, but the sudden explosion of one group at the expense of another.” Paleontologist, Derek V. Ager (Department of Geology & Oceanography, University College, Swansea, UK) “It is a feature of the known fossil record that most taxa appear abruptly. They are not, as a rule, led up to by a sequence of almost imperceptibly changing forerunners such as Darwin believed should be usual in evolution…This phenomenon becomes more universal and more intense as the hierarchy of categories is ascended. Gaps among known species are sporadic and often small. Gaps among known orders, classes and phyla are systematic and almost always large.” G.G.Simpson – one of the most influential American Paleontologist of the 20th century “Given the fact of evolution, one would expect the fossils to document a gradual steady change from ancestral forms to the descendants. But this is not what the paleontologist finds. Instead, he or she finds gaps in just about every phyletic series.” – Ernst Mayr-Professor Emeritus, Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University “What is missing are the many intermediate forms hypothesized by Darwin, and the continual divergence of major lineages into the morphospace between distinct adaptive types.” Robert L Carroll (born 1938) – vertebrate paleontologist who specialises in Paleozoic and Mesozoic amphibians “In virtually all cases a new taxon appears for the first time in the fossil record with most definitive features already present, and practically no known stem-group forms.” Fossils and Evolution, TS Kemp – Curator of Zoological Collections, Oxford University, Oxford Uni Press, p246, 1999
Posted on: Sun, 16 Feb 2014 03:28:19 +0000
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