The bulk of the fossil record is found in a series of lay- ers commencing with the Cambrian. The Cambrian is associated with an explosive occurrence of various diverse fossil forms. The sudden and almost simultaneous appearance of fossils, from even different phyla, has been termed “the Cambrian explosion”. Pre- Cambrian fossils are largely limited to microorganisms, and where macrofossils occur, they are normally at contact zones with the Cambrian and difficult to ascribe to one or the other layer.
If evolution were true, one would expect a progressive advance from simple to complex in the fossil record, but amaz- ingly one finds that even the so called higher life forms such as the chordates appear right in the beginning. In an article entitled “The Big Bang of Animal Evolution”, Jeffrey S. Levinton, professor in ecology and evolution at the State University of New York states:
The Cambrian explosion was characterized by the sudden and roughly simultaneous appearance of many diverse animal forms almost 600 million years ago. No other period in the history of animal life can match this remarkable burst of evolutionary creativity.5
He goes on to say that evolutionary lawns rather than trees appear to be the norm. An evolutionary tree normally shows a common ancestor with branches leading to organisms that develop later in time. In a lawn, all the branches are parallel which means there is no so-called common ancestor. Levinton concludes:
Those stories point to a serious problem with all arguments about evolution that rely on taxonomic classification. Some of the fossils that suggest the existence of unique classes are very poor scraps from the geological table.
The fact that all the major phyla appear simultaneously in the fossil record is a strong argument for creation rather than evolution. Even Charles Darwin admitted this in the first edition of the Origin of Species. He writes regarding this issue:
The case at present must remain inexplicable and may be truly urged as a valid argument against the views here entertained.6
These facts have urged Neo-Darwinists such as Stephen J. Gould to reconsider Darwin’s idea of gradualism (the slow development of one form out of another over time) and replaced it with the concept of evolution through punctuated equilibrium (periods of equilibrium followed by rapid (punctuated) changes). Whatever one wishes to term it, the fact remains that organisms appear suddenly which is in harmony with the creation account. Punctuated equilibrium has many hurdles to cross, particularly in the sphere of genetics, where it must be explained how so many useful mutations could come about so rapidly or be employed usefully in an integrated fashion without there being prior design. The idea that all major phyla could appear at once seems to be stretching it to say the least.
Current concepts require vast time periods, measured in millions of years, to accommodate changes from one life form to another. Standard geology, therefore, supposes vast time periods for each of the geological layers to account for this period of time. Historically, the time periods became longer as evidence for the complexity of evolutionary change became greater. It is interesting that new evidence of the very rapid appearance of life on earth, and the absence of evidence for change over long periods of time, have forced scientists in the opposite direction, and they are just as willing to slash vast ages out of the geological column, as they were to insert them. 7
The problem is so vast that it almost seems as if scientists are becoming desperate to find a solution to the problem. They are even talking of “Evolving at Supersonic Speed”. A group of research- ers from M.I.T. and Harvard found it necessary to recalibrate the geological clock by chopping the time for the Cambrian in half and then cramming the evolutionary events into the first third, prompting Gould to state:
Fast is now a lot faster than we thought, and that’s extraordinarily interesting. 8
Gould states that full diversity was reached in the Cam- brian explosion, and this admittance is only one step away from special creation. Indeed creationists do just a little more chopping to the time scale. A recent discovery of even a vertebrate from the Cambrian shows beyond doubt that full diversity was reached in the Cambrian Explosion, and this further complicates the issue for naturalistic evolution over millions of years.9 If full diversity was there from the beginning, then that sounds like special creation.