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Cambrian Explosion Explained by Yeast Clumping Together

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We’ve made sort of a hobby of collating and dissecting theories of how an explosion of complex novel life forms, the Cambrian explosion, can be explained without reference to the obvious explanation, intelligent design.

It’s almost too much to keep up with:

And more.

Now comes the yeast theory. From New Scientist:

Simple lab life makes an evolutionary leap in a few generations

Just a few generations after evolving multicellularity, lab yeasts have already settled into at least two distinct lifestyles.

The discovery suggests that organisms can swiftly fill new niches opened up by evolutionary innovations, just as the first multicellular animals appear to have done on Earth, hundreds of millions of years ago.

In the lab, yeast cells clumped together, forming larger and smaller “snowflakes.”

In short, large and small yeast morphs specialise in different settling strategies, so both can coexist.

These two distinct ecological strategies appeared almost immediately once the multicellular yeasts themselves evolved, notes Travisano.

This provides experimental proof that when evolution makes a great leap forward — such as the origin of multicellularity — organisms can diversify rapidly to take advantage of the change.

Many years ago, palaeontologist Stephen Jay Gould suggested that a similar sudden ecological diversification may have led to the Cambrian Explosion in which most animal body forms arose in the fossil record within a few tens of millions of years.

“Possibly what we see here is the first step of what Gould’s talking about — the opening up of diversity due to a key innovation,” says Travisano.

Yeast cells clump together. Ergo trilobites.

“Possibly,” given a “few tens of millions of years,” this could represent a “first step” toward massive diversification.

Ann Gauger has written here about not entirely dissimilar speculations about the development of multicellularity, with Volvox rather than yeast as the illustration. “Saying that something might have happened,” she observes, “is not the same as showing that it actually could happen.”

A simple transition from clumping yeast to menagerie of beasts leaves even more “white space,” as Dr. Gauger politely puts it, to fill in with needed details.

The white space in the yeast theory is blinding. It’s a blizzard of white, obscuring all vision.

The truth is that evolutionists have no idea what produced the Cambrian explosion. Yet, knowing this is an almost immeasurably vast defect in the armature of their theory, they keep throwing speculations at it in the hope that something will stick, or clump.

The solution, though, is right before their eyes, or anyway, your eyes:

Image: Saccharomyces cerevisiae cells, by Masur (Own work) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

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David Klinghoffer

Senior Fellow and Editor, Evolution News
David Klinghoffer is a Senior Fellow at Discovery Institute and the editor of Evolution News & Science Today, the daily voice of Discovery Institute’s Center for Science & Culture, reporting on intelligent design, evolution, and the intersection of science and culture. Klinghoffer is also the author of six books, a former senior editor and literary editor at National Review magazine, and has written for the Los Angeles Times, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Seattle Times, Commentary, and other publications. Born in Santa Monica, California, he graduated from Brown University in 1987 with an A.B. magna cum laude in comparative literature and religious studies. David lives near Seattle, Washington, with his wife and children.

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