An article appeared in The New York Times last week written by the popular geneticist, Sean B. Carroll, who is probably best known for his professional and popular work on the emerging science of evo devo. Carroll’s article attempts to refute the challenges posed by the Cambrian fossil record to evolutionary thought. Carroll writes, The difficulty posed by the Cambrian Explosion was that in Darwin’s day (and for many years after), no fossils were known in the enormous, older rock formations below those of the Cambrian. This was an extremely unsettling fact for his theory of evolution because complex animals should have been preceded in the fossil record by simpler forms.In “On the Origin of Species,” Darwin posited that “during Read More ›