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Fossil Friday: Discontinuities in the Fossil Record — A Problem for Neo-Darwinism

May 10, 2024, 6:13 AM
Photo credit: Daderot, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons.

This Fossil Friday I want to address the common request to provide an expanded written form of my lectures on discontinuities in the fossil record (e.g., on YouTube here, here, and here) together with references to mainstream scientific papers that back up these arguments against neo-Darwinism. Since the sudden appearance of trilobites in the Cambrian Explosion is one of the best known examples for discontinuities in the fossil record, I chose the early trilobite Wanneria sp. from the Lower Cambrian of Canada as today’s featured fossil. So let’s jump right in.

The fossil record generally documents a discontinuous history of life with sudden appearances of new body plans and new forms of life in saltational events of abrupt origins that have been called explosions, revolutions, and Big Bangs even by mainstream evolutionary biologists, who would hardly have given such names to slow and gradual transitions (Bechly & Meyer 2017, Bechly 2021e, 2023d). This fact was readily admitted by eminent evolutionary biologists such as Ernst Mayr, who said that “Wherever we look at the living biota … discontinuities are overwhelmingly frequent … The discontinuities are even more striking in the fossil record” (Mayr 2001: 189) or Hickman et al. (1988), who noted that “most major groups of animals appear abruptly in the fossil record, fully formed, and with no fossils yet discovered that form a transition from their parent group.” Famous biologist and bestseller author Stephen Jay Gould called this phenomenon “the trade secret of paleontology” (Gould 1977), which eerily suggests that there is something to hide.

The pattern of abrupt origins of biological novelties is the general rule in all periods of Earth History, in all geographical regions, and in all groups of organisms from protists, to plants, to invertebrates and vertebrate animals. Such a consistent pattern in the fossil record cries out for an adequate explanation of the empirical data.

Every theory makes certain predictions and these predictions have to be tested with empirical evidence. Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution necessarily predicts a gradual development of life. Therefore he insisted on gradualism, against the advice of his good friend Thomas Huxley. Darwin quoted in his magnum opus The Origin of Species (Darwin 1859) not less that six times the Latin dictum “natura non facit saltus”, nature does not make jumps, because he wanted to present a fully naturalistic explanation for the history of life on our planet, knowing perfectly well that saltations would have tacitly implied miracle-like intelligent interventions. The prediction of gradualism is not accidental and not a dispensable side issue in Darwinism. This was made clear by Richard Dawkins, arguably the most ardent modern popularizer of Darwinism, in his bestselling book The Greatest Show on Earth (Dawkins 2009), where he explicitly clarified that “Evolution not only is a gradual process as a matter of fact; it has to be gradual if it is to do any explanatory work.” In another book titled Climbing Mount Improbable (Dawkins 1996) he explained the reasons with a beautiful metaphor: Imagine the task to reach the top of a steep and tall cliff from the sea shore. It would be an improbable (or rather impossible) miracle to achieve this task with a single big jump. However, if there was a gentle slope on the backside of the cliff, you could easily and effortlessly climb the mountain with a lot of small successive steps. This is the way evolution must operate according to Darwin and Dawkins: not by sudden miraculous jumps, but many small steps, that are each not unlikely to happen accidentally without intelligent intervention, and which accumulate over long periods of time to add up to big biological differences.

Of course, Charles Darwin was quite aware that the fossil record does not support this prediction of gradualism and admitted: “Geology assuredly does not reveal any such finely graduated organic chain; and this, perhaps, is the most obvious and gravest objection which can be urged against my theory. The explanation lies, as I believe, in the extreme imperfection of the geological record.” (Darwin 1859). For this very reason, the prominent intelligent design theorist Stephen Meyer titled his bestselling book about the problem of the abrupt appearance of animal body plans in the Cambrian Explosion, Darwin’s Doubt (Meyer 2013). This doubt still is with us until today, as was admitted by the renowned Harvard paleontologist George Gaylord Simpson, who is widely considered to be the most influential paleontologist of the 20th century and co-founder of the modern evolutionary synthesis (= neo-Darwinism). He wrote about 100 years after Darwin (Simpson 1960): “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. … These peculiarities of the fossil record pose one of the most important theoretical problems in the whole history of life.”

As I have just mentioned before, Darwin still appealed to the incompleteness of the fossil record and our insufficient knowledge of it as explanation of the conflicting evidence. This ad hoc explanation is still quite popular and it has been said by vertebrate paleontologist Philip Gingerich that “Gaps of evidence are gaps of evidence and not evidence of gaps” (alluding to Carl Sagan’s famous dictum that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence). But is this really true? Actually, we can use statistical tests of the data to find out. How this works was nicely explained by intelligent design theorist and philosopher Paul Nelson with the following metaphor: imagine you choose beach-combing as a new hobby. You walk along the shore every day and collect what the flood washes in. In the beginning you find something new and exciting on a daily basis, from mussels and snails to starfish and driftwood. But over time repetition sets in until you finally mostly find the same stuff that you already collected many times before, and only very rarely you will still find something new like a message in a bottle. This is the point when you can be sure that you sampled enough to know what is out there to find. What is still lacking is not lacking because of under-sampling or sampling bias. The very same approach is indeed used in paleontology to statistically test the completeness of the fossil record and our knowledge thereof. It is called the collector curve (Benton 2009), which plots the discovery of new fossil taxa in a diagram with say the number of newly discovered species in the y-axis and the invested effort (in man-hours or grant money) over time on the x-axis. In the beginning the plotted sigmoidal curve is steep, which means you don’t have to invest a lot of time and money to find something new, but with progressing research the curve flattens and ultimately it reaches a point of saturation, where we know that we have a pretty good estimate of what existed. Such statistical studies of the fossil record have been made for many groups and have shown that “completeness is rather high for many animal groups” (Foote & Sepkoski 1999). Of course, such a statistic result depends on the level of the taxonomic hierarchy you look at. On the lowest level of species diversity the fossil record will always remain highly incomplete, since less than 1% of all species that ever existed have become fossilized according to most estimates. However, when looking at macroevolution we are not really interested in the question if there was just one species of Tyrannosaurus or maybe a dozen. On the higher taxonomic levels, which are relevant for macroevolution, the fossil record is very complete (Kalmar & Currie 2009: “Collector’s curves of the number of described families over the past 200 years suggest that the … the family-level continental fossil record is reasonably representative”). For example, 80 percent of all families of living land vertebrates are represented in the fossil record (Denton 1985), which can be readily extrapolated to most other groups and time horizons.

Before we look at some examples for abrupt origins, we have to address a potential objection. When we call appearances of new body plans within windows of time of 5-10 million years abrupt, an obvious objection might be that this still sounds like a lot of time, where a lot of stuff could happen. This is certainly true in terms of human history, but geologically and biologically speaking, such windows of time really are just a blink of an eye. How short are they? A good approximation to grasp the brevity of these time spans is the fact that according to standard text book wisdom the average longevity of an animal species is 5-10 million years for marine invertebrates (May et al. 1995: table 1.1, Levinton 2001: table 7.2), 3-10 million years for insects (Hörnschemeyer et al. 2010, Penney & Jepson 2014: 198-199), and only 2.3-4.43 million years for vertebrates like mammals (Prothero 2014). Thus, a window of time of 5 million years is roughly equivalent to a succession of just 1-2 ancestor-descendant species with only minor differences to each other, so that this can hardly explain the massive re-engineering of body plans within the same time. There is simply too much change in too short time to be reasonably explained with an unguided mechanism!

Now let’s have a look at some examples from different periods of Earth history.

The Origin of Life (3.8 bya)

Evidence suggests that the first living cells arose very early in the history of planet Earth, almost as soon as conditions on our planet would permit. Over the last several decades most origin-of-life biologists and geochemists have placed the origin of the first life at about 3.8 billion years ago just after the cessation of the meteorite bombardment of the Earth called the Late Heavy Bombardment (4.1-3.8 billion years ago). The oldest fossil evidence for life is indeed 3.77 billion years old (Dodd et al. 2017), even though all such ancient microbial fossils remain more or less controversial in their interpretation and dating. The latest indirect evidence from biogenic carbon in zircon crystals suggests that life was already present 4.1 billion years ago in the Hadean era, even before the Late Heavy Bombardment, when life could only survive in subterranean niches (Sleep 2010, Bell et al. 2015). Either way, life seems to have arisen abruptly about as soon as it possibly could, given conditions on the early Earth, and not after billions of years of chemical evolution. Time is not the hero of the plot.

The Origin of Photosynthesis (3.8 bya)

The origin of photosynthesis was a key event that made later plant and animal life on Earth possible in the first place, which is a kind of terra-forming that could very well represent a powerful separate argument in favour of design. Photosynthesis involves two intricate and integrated sets of complex biochemical processes known as photosystems I and II, which are in turn made of many equally complex proteins. The earliest existence of cyanobacteria, the first photosynthetic cells, is documented by stromatolites from 3.7 billion year old rocks from the Isua supracrustal belt in Greenland (Czaja et al. 2013, Nutman et al. 2016). Nevertheless, indirect evidence suggests an even earlier origin of photosynthesis about 3.8 billion years ago (Sleep 2010, Hecht 2013, Pecoits et al. 2015). Because the mentioned Late Heavy (meteorite) Bombardment (4.1-3.8 billion years ago), “repeatedly boiled away the existing oceans into steam atmospheres” (Marchi et al. 2014) and only left subterranean environmental niches (Sleep 2010, Bell et al. 2015), photosynthesis was only possible in the Earth’s oceans after the bombardment ceased. That implies that photosynthesis with all its integrated biochemical complexity originated abruptly as soon as the Earth first offered a stable and suitable environment for the process to occur, and yet again not after long periods of gradual evolution.

The Avalon Explosion (575-565 mya)

During the Ediacaran, the latest period of the Precambrian era, an enigmatic group of organisms appears abruptly in the fossil record. Radiometric dating studies fix the date for the first appearance of these Ediacaran biota at about 575–565 million years ago. These strange marine organisms include microbial mats covering the sea bottom and enigmatic large sessile organisms that lack any visible feeding apparatus (a peaceful “Garden of Ediacara”), and mostly have a quilted body with glide symmetry and fractal growth. Late Precambrian-era sediments around the world have yielded three main types of Ediacaran fossils. The first group consists of the sponge-like organisms. The second is the distinctive group of fossils from the Ediacaran Hills in Australia and similar localities around the world. The creatures fossilized there include such well-known forms as the flat, air mattress-like body of Dickinsonia; the enigmatic Spriggina, with its elongated and segmented body and alleged “head shield”; and the frond-like Charnia. The third group of fossils named Kimberella, discovered in the cliffs along the White Sea in northwestern Russia, have been claimed to be primitive mollusks, but this identification is highly controversial (Cunningham et al. 2017, Budd & Jensen 2017). Nevertheless, apart from sponges and a few controversial fossils that have been attributed to algae, cnidarians and primitive mollusks, the Ediacaran biota have no obvious relationship to later life forms, and their systematic status is strongly disputed, ranging from identifications as giant protists, to representatives of an independent multicellular kingdom, to metazoan animals, or even lichens. All alleged affinities to animals are especially controversial and disputed even within mainstream evolutionary biology (Bechly 2018d, 2020a-c, 2020e-g, 2021a-c, 2022c, 2023i). Whatever their classification, all groups originated abruptly without any known putative ancestors during what is now known as the Avalon Explosion (Shen et al. 2008). Indeed, the Ediacaran fossils provide evidence of a puzzling leap in biological complexity. Before the Ediacaran organisms appeared, the only living forms documented in the fossil record for over 3 billion years were single-celled organisms, colonial algae, and maybe sponges. Although the humble Ediacaran biota look simple beside most of the later Cambrian animals, they exhibit a much higher degree of complex organization than the single-celled organisms and colonial algae that preceded them. No series of intermediate forms documents any such transition happened in a gradual Darwinian way.

The Cambrian Explosion (537-508 mya)

The Cambrian Explosion refers to a dramatic period in the history of life when many new and anatomically sophisticated animals appeared suddenly in the sedimentary layers of the geologic column without any discernible evidence of simpler ancestral forms in the earlier layers below. Fossil discoveries during this period attest to the first appearance of animals representing more than twenty phyla (the largest division of animal classification) as well as many more subphyla and classes, each manifesting distinctive body plans, where a body plan represents a unique arrangement of body parts and tissues. Indeed, animals representing most of the body plans that have ever existed on Earth first appear during this explosive event. One especially dramatic fact of the Cambrian explosion is the first appearance of many novel marine invertebrate animals (representatives of separate invertebrate phyla, subphyla, and classes in the traditional classification scheme). Some of these animals have mineralized exoskeletons, including those representing phyla such as echinoderms, brachiopods, and arthropods, each with their clearly distinct and novel constructions. Several unexpected features of the Cambrian explosion from a Darwinian point of view are: (1) the sudden appearance of a startling array of completely novel animal forms with novel body plans; (2) an absence of transitional intermediate fossils connecting the Cambrian animals to simpler Precambrian forms; and (3) a pattern in which radical differences in form in the fossil record arise before more minor, small-scale diversification and variations. This latter pattern turns on its head the Darwinian expectation of small incremental change only gradually resulting in larger and larger differences in form. The abruptness of the explosion is also dramatic from both a geological and evolutionary standpoint. Most experts date the duration of the Cambrian explosion to 10-25 million years about 540-515 million years ago (Bowring et al. 1993, Marshall 2006, Budd 2008, 2013, Erwin et al. 2011, Lee et al. 2013, Shu et al. 2014). Others emphasize that the main pulse of this event occurred within only 530-520 million years ago (Marshall & Valentine 2010, Erwin & Valentine 2013). Other studies even suggest that between 13-16 new animal phyla arose within a narrow 5-6 million year window of the larger explosive radiation (Erwin et al. 2011, Bowring et al. 2013, Meyer 2013). In any case, most Cambrian experts agree that the majority of Cambrian animal phyla lack any putative fossil ancestors within the preceding Ediacaran biota (Conway Morris 2000, 2006). For this very reason, the Cambrian Explosion has been variously called “Evolution’s Big Bang” (Time 1995) and “Darwin’s Dilemma” (Conway Morris 2006).

Of course, Darwinists are deeply concerned by this conflicting evidence and tried to explain it away: A very popular objection to the problem of the Cambrian Explosion has been the claim that in the Late Precambrian there maybe existed no suitable geological deposits that could preserve the potentially small and soft-bodied ancestors of the Cambrian animal phyla. This so-called artefact hypothesis has been addressed and refuted by Stephen C. Meyer (2013). But there is even a more decisive refutation of this claim: in the past years numerous fossil localities of the so-called Burgess-Shale-type (BST) have been discovered from the Late Precambrian Ediacaran period (Bechly 2020d), for example in Mongolia (Dornbos et al. 2016) and China (Yuan et al. 2011). Because these localities only produced fossil algae and a few problematic fossils, but no uncontroversial animals at all, even mainstream scientists concluded that fossil animals are not absent because they have not been preserved or found but because they did not yet exist (Daley et al. 2018). We can conclude with Derek Briggs (2015), who is one of the world leading experts on Cambrian fossils: “We now know that the sudden appearance of fossils in the Cambrian … is real and not an artefact of an imperfect fossil record.”

Another common argument has been the claim, that the so-called Small Shelly Fauna (SSF) bridges the gap between the Ediacaran and Lower Cambrian and establishes some kind of evolutionary continuity (Marshall 2013, Matzke 2013). This critique has also been addressed before (Luskin 2015, Meyer 2015). Most importantly, this argument is based on a fallacy of equivocation between two distinct types of small shelly faunas that are unrelated except for the name. The first type is the Ediacaran small shelly fauna (549-538 mya), which mainly consists of the three problematic taxa Cloudina, Namacalathus, and Namapoikia. The second type is the Lower Cambrian Small Shelly Fauna (SSF) proper, which was most prominent in the Cambrian Stage 2 or Tommotian (537-517 mya). This SSF is generally considered as index fossils for the beginning of the Cambrian period. It falls within the wider range of the Cambrian Explosion and consists of tiny fragments from exoskeletons and shells of the typical Cambrian animal phyla and the problematic anabaritids. These two faunas are very distinct and do not grade into each other, except for a brief overlap of two problematic genera Anabarites and Protohertzina between the terminal Ediacaran and the earliest Cambrian. Thus, there simply is no continuity or demonstrable phylogenetic connection with the Cambrian Small Shelly Fauna. This was readily admitted by leading experts on Cambrian fossils, who said “although Ediacaran phosphate deposits are common, they lack SSF, suggesting that bilaterian clades acquired skeletons during the Cambrian” (Erwin et al. 2011).

Yet another objection came from the study of trace fossils like fossilized tracks and burrows. It was claimed that there is a potential continuity between the sparse and simple trace fossils of the Ediacaran period and the very diverse and highly complex trace fossils of the Lower Cambrian period. However, there is no such continuity between the horizontal trace fossils on the surface of the Ediacaran microbial mats (Seilacher et al. 2005) and the vertically deep and complex burrows in the trace fossil record of the Lower Cambrian, which has not for nothing be called the “Cambrian Substrate Revolution” (Bottjer et al. 2000). Nevertheless, it was a reasonable argument, that the simple Ediacaran traces may have been made by the precursors of the animal makers of the more complex Cambrian burrows. This argument collapsed with a seminal new study by Mariotti et al. (2016). The scientists did some interesting experiments based on the fact that the Ediacaran biota were characterized by microbial mats covering the sea floor. Mariotti et al. cultivated such microbial mats in aquariums, stirred them up, and looked at what kind of artefacts are formed by the settling mats. Lo and behold, all of the complex Ediacaran traces known at that time could be identically reproduced as artefacts of such microbial mats. This refuted most of the Precambrian ichnofossil record as invalid or at least unconvincing evidence for animal activity. Another crucial argument was presented by Matz (2008), based on the discovery that bilaterian-like traces are today produced on the deep-seafloor by giant protists, so that similar Ediacaran traces cannot be considered evidence for metazoan activity either.

Finally, it is a common trope among critics to claim that the Cambrian Explosion was a much longer and more gradual event (e.g., Anonymous 2018), even though most actual experts on Cambrian fossils have strongly affirmed the reality and abruptness of this event (see references in Luskin 2013a,b and Bechly 2018a, 2021d, 2022j-l, 2023j). The study by Daley et al. (2018) about arthropod origins was cited in support of such a claim. However, the actual findings of this study suggested the exact opposite conclusion: the authors found crown group arthropods 521 million years ago and stem group arthropods 518 million years ago. This already creates a temporal paradox and requires a ghost lineage as ad hoc explanation for the assumed descendants being older than the assumed ancestors. Therefore the authors looked at the trace fossil record and found Cruziana and Rusophycus traces with an even older age of 537 million years. These traces are well known walking and resting traces of trilobite-like arthropods. The authors also explicitly admitted that the Burgess Shale Type (BST) localities from the Late Precambrian (Ediacaran) age completely lacked any animals 550 million years ago. Rather than proving a 40-million-year-long slow evolution of arthropods this study therefore proved that trilobite-like arthropods already existed just 13 million years after a time when no animals at all existed. This means that within the average longevity of just 1-2 successive marine invertebrate species a transition was made from a jelly-like pre-animal to a genuine arthropod with its complete set of complex features (i.e., exoskeleton, segmented legs, chewing mouth parts, compound eyes, nervous system with brain, and gut system). This strongly confirms the biological abruptness of the Cambrian Explosion rather than refuting it. This example also shows how important it is to compare the bold claims in press releases and popular science media headlines with the actual data of the concerning scientific studies, which often do not support these claims that are rather driven by world view agenda than by good science.

Last but not least, there have recently been claims by proponents of the modern field of evo-devo research that the Cambrian Explosion did not require any significant novel biological information in terms of new genes and new proteins to account for the origin of the different animal body plans. Instead a simple rewiring of the so-called gene regulatory networks (GRNs) and of a lego-brick-like set of Hox genes should be sufficient as explanation. Such claims have been decisively refuted (see Bechly 2018c, 2022m) by recent genomic studies (e.g., Paps & Holland 2018), which demonstrated that all major transitions in the history of life, such as the origin of animal phyla in the Cambrian Explosion, correlated with novel genes and new proteins that account for new cell types, new tissues, and new organs. The inconvenient truth of the Cambrian Explosion stubbornly refuses to be explained away.

The Great Ordovician Biodiversification Event / GOBE (485-460 mya)

While general animal body plans representing distinct phyla, subphyla and classes first appeared in the Cambrian Explosion, these marine invertebrate groups greatly diversified on lower taxonomic levels (e.g., about 300 new families) during a relatively short period of time in an event known as the Great Ordovician Biodiversification about 485-460 million years ago (Servais et al. 2010, Harper et al. 2015). This explosive diversification of marine life has been called “Life’s second Big Bang” by O’Donoghue (2008), who mentions “that the ‘Ordovician explosion’ was every bit as momentous for animal evolution as the Cambrian one.” In a recent paper, I discussed in detail the pro and con arguments concerning the Great Ordovician Biodiversification Event with numerous references to the up-to-date technical literature (Bechly 2022l).

Top-Down vs Bottom-Up

The clear “top-down” pattern of fossil appearance raises an additional difficulty for the theory of universal common descent and the Darwinian picture of the history of life. Darwinian theory (both classical and modern) implies that as new animal forms first began to emerge from a common ancestor, they would be quite similar to each other, and that larger differences in the forms of life—what paleontologists call disparity—would only emerge much later as the result of the accumulation of many small incremental changes. In its technical sense, disparity refers to the major differences in form that separate the higher-level taxonomic categories such as phyla, classes, and orders. In contrast, the term diversity refers to minor differences among organisms classified as different genera or species. Put another way, disparity refers to life’s basic themes; diversity refers to the variations on those themes.

According to the theory of universal common descent and current understanding of how the mutation/natural selection mechanism works, the differences in form, or “morphological distance,” between evolving organisms should increase gradually over time as small-scale mutations accumulate by natural selection to produce increasingly complex forms and structures (including, eventually, new body plans). In other words, one would expect small-scale differences or diversity among species to precede large-scale morphological disparity among phyla. As the former Oxford University Neo-Darwinian biologist Richard Dawkins has put it, “What had been distinct species within one genus become, in the fullness of time, distinct genera within one family. Later, families will be found to have diverged to the point where taxonomists (specialists in classification) prefer to call them orders, then classes, then phyla.” (Dawkins 1998: 201).

Darwin (1859: 120–125) himself made this point in his Origin of Species. In explaining his famous branching-tree diagram, he noted how higher taxa should emerge from lower taxa by the accumulation of numerous slight variations.

The actual pattern in the fossil record, however, contradicts this expectation. Instead of more and more species eventually leading to more genera, leading to more families, orders, classes and phyla, the fossil record shows representatives of separate phyla appearing first followed by lower-level diversification on those basic themes. For example, during the Cambrian Explosion representatives of many higher taxa such as phyla and classes (each representing distinctive body plans) first appear abruptly in the fossil record. Only later, do order- and family- and genus-level representatives of those distinctive body plans originate (in events such as the Great Ordovician Bio-diversification Event or the Mammalian Radiation, for example). As paleontologists Douglas Erwin, James Valentine, and Jack Sepkoski noted: “The fossil record suggests that the major pulse of diversification of phyla occurs before that of classes, classes before that of orders, orders before that of families. … The higher taxa do not seem to have diverged through an accumulation of lower taxa.” (Erwin et al. 1987: 1183; also see Bowring et al. 1993 and Erwin et al. 2011).

Even though I personally still think that the total evidence is elegantly explained by common descent, I have to admit that there also exists substantial conflicting evidence like this (or like highly implausible oceanic dispersal events; see Bechly 2018b and Bechly 2023k; also see Bechly 2024d), which shows that alternative views should not be rejected out of hand as unsupported or unscientific.

The Silurio-Devonian Terrestrial Revolution (427-393 mya)

The sudden origin and diversification of vascular land plants (Tracheophyta) in the Late Silurian and Early Devonian is one of the great mysteries in the history of life. One of the two oldest known vascular land plants, Baraghwanatia, already belongs to the modern subgroup of clubmosses. Bateman et al. (1998) concluded that “the Siluro-Devonian primary radiation of land biotas is the terrestrial equivalent of the much-debated Cambrian ‘explosion’ of marine faunas.”

The Devonian Nekton Revolution (410-400 mya)

Klug et al. (2010) described a radical change in the composition of the marine fauna of the Early Devonian, which he named the Devonian Nekton Revolution (also see Bechly 2023g for a critical discussion). While previously the marine ecosystems were dominated by planktonic (drifting) and demersal (near sea bottom) taxa, between 410-400 million years ago a very sudden and enormous expansion of marine nektonic (actively swimming) animals occurred, in which groups such as ammonoid cephalopods and jawed fish make their first appearance. Within just 10 million years such active swimmers increased from only 5% to about 75% of the marine fauna.

The Odontode Explosion (425-415 mya)

The term “odontode explosion” was coined by Fraser et al. (2010) for the sudden appearance of vertebrate dentition. Within 10 million years (425-415 mya) between the Late Silurian and Early Devonian all major groups of jawed fish with teeth and tooth-like structures (odontodes) appear abruptly in the fossil record. These include stem-gnathostomes like the arthrodiran Entelognathus (423 mya), spiny sharks or Acanthodii (Nerepisacanthus, 423-419 mya), the oldest known cartilaginous fishes or Chondrichthyes (sharks like Stigmodus and Plectrodus, 423-419 mya), and the oldest known bony fishes or Osteichthyes, the latter already with the modern subgroups of lobe-finned Sarcopterygii (Guiyu, 423.5 mya) and ray-finned Actinopterygii (Meemannia, 415 mya).

The Devonian Terrestrial Revolution (395 mya)

This crucial event in the history of land-based life includes the appearance of land vegetation, of terrestrial arthropods, and of quadrupedal vertebrates. The latter appeared suddenly in the fossil record about 375-365 million years ago with animals like the iconic Ichthyostega and Acanthostega. There still more fish-like assumed precursors appeared 385-375 million years ago with Elpistostegalia such as Panderichthys and the famous Tiktaalik. So far so good, but in 2010 the tracks of a quadrupedal animal with toes were described from the Zachelmie limestone quarry in Poland (Niedźwiedzki et al. 2010), which is dated to an age of about 395 million years (Dalton 2010). These tetrapod tracks are 10 million years older than any of their assumed fish-like ancestors (elpistostegalians) among the lobe-finned-fish (Ahlberg 2019), and even 3-5 million years older than the oldest Tetrapodomorpha with salmon-like fish such as Eusthenopteron. This implies a temporal paradox of the assumed descendants being older than the assumed ancestors, so that evolutionists have to postulate a so-called ghost lineage of undocumented existence as an ad hoc explanation of the conflicting evidence.

The Carboniferous Insect Explosion (325-314/307 mya)

In the Pennsylvanian (Upper Carboniferous) era between 318-300 million years ago, when the world was dominated by vast tropical swamp forests, a large diversity of different winged insect groups appeared suddenly without any known transitional forms in the older Mississippian (Lower Carboniferous) or Devonian strata (Strahler 1999, Labandeira 2005, Grimaldi & Engel 2005, Nicholson 2015, Wang et al. 2016, Bechly 2023b). According to leading experts, “an insect equivalent of an Archaeopteryx remains elusive” (Grimaldi & Engel 2005: 160). The early fossil record of Carboniferous winged insects does not only include giant palaeopterous insects like the extinct palaeodictyopterans, mayflies, and dragonflies, or “primitive” neopterous insect orders like stoneflies, roaches, and orthopterans, but also thrips, bugs, and even advanced holometabolans like wasps, beetles, and scorpionflies. The latter groups posses the complete metamorphosis with a pupal stage, where the caterpillar-like body plan of the larval stage is dissolved into a kind of cell tissue soup and rearranged into the very different adult body plan of the winged imago. It is hardly possible to explain an evolutionary origin of this marvelous metaphorphosis at all, as the only suggested hypothesis, the so-called pronymph-hypothesis by Truman & Riddiford (1999), has to make the extremely implausible assumption that the main feeding stage (caterpillar) originated from a non-feeding late embryonal stage (pronymph) (see Bechly 2023n). Apart from that, it is certainly unexpected to find this sophisticated ontogenetic process already with early flying insects rather than after hundreds of millions of years of gradual evolution.

The Triassic Explosions

In the Triassic period we find a kind of carpet bombing of explosive origins of biological novelty after the end-Permian mass extinction (about 252 million years ago). It was also called the Early Triassic metazoan radiation or post-Permian radiation. No new phyla and classes, but many new orders and families originated abruptly among marine invertebrates (e.g., bivalves and ceratites), insects (e.g., Coleoptera and Diptera), and tetrapods (see below). Famous paleontologist Peter Ward (2006: 160), who is an ardent critic of intelligent design, explained that “the diversity of Triassic animal plans is analogous to the diversity of marine body plans that resulted from the Cambrian Explosion. It also occurred for nearly the same reasons and, as will be shown, was as important for animal life on land as the Cambrian Explosion was for marine animal life.”

It is certainly true, that the apocalyptic end-Permian mass extinction opened up a lot of vacant ecological niches, but this is at best a necessary condition but not a sufficient condition for the very quick origin of biological novelty, which required complex new genetic information that does not pop into being only because of new ecological opportunities.

The Triassic Tetrapod Radiation (251-240 mya)

Directly after the great Permo-Triassic mass extinction the first representatives of modern tetrapod taxa appear suddenly within a short window of time between 251-240 million years ago (Ezcurra 2010, Ezcurra et al. 2014). These include the first dinosaurs (Nyasasaurus), the alleged first turtles (Pappochelys; but see Bechly 2022b), the first lizard-relatives or Lepidosauromorpha (Paliguana), the first croc-relatives or Crurotarsi (Ctenodiscosaurus), and the first mammal-like animals or Mammaliaformes (Haramiyida; see Abdala et al. 2007). Except for the latter two groups, they all appear virtually out of thin air without discernible connections to any known ancestors (Ward 2006).

The Early Triassic Marine Reptile Radiation (248-240 mya)

After the great end-Permian mass extinction 15 different families of marine reptiles appear abruptly between 248-240 million years ago in the Early Triassic (Twitchett & Foster 2012: fig. 5, Bechly 2023c). They include for example ichthyosaurs, plesiosaur-like pistosaurids, hupehsuchians, nothosaurs, thalattosaurs, pachypleurosaurs, tanystropheids, placodontians, and the enigmatic Aptodentatus. A vertebrate paleontologist, who is an agnostic and a renowned scientist specializing in ichthyosaurs, and who must remain anonymous to protect his career, told me that the sudden appearance of viviparous fully formed fish-like ichthyosaurs within 4 million years after the Permo-Triassic mass extinction (Bechly 2023a) made him doubt the neo-Darwinian story.

The Mid Triassic Gliding / Flying Reptile Radiation (230-210 mya)

Within only few million years of the Mid-Triassic there is a sudden appearance of gliding and flying reptiles, like Sharovipteryx (with wings on the legs), Mecistotrachelos and the unrelated Kuehneosauridae (with gliding membrane across lateral rib-like projections), Longisquama (with long feather-like scales on the back), and the earliest pterosaurs like Preondactylus (Dalla Veccia 2013, Kellner 2015, Bechly 2022g, 2023h, 2023l) that were the first vertebrates to achieve powered flight with bat-like wings supported by a single enlarged finger. The only gliding vertebrates prior to the Triassic were a group of small Permian reptiles called coelurosauravids. They were the first-ever gliding reptiles and appeared without any transition either. They strongly resembled the living common flying dragon (Draco volans) from the South East Asian rainforests, on which McGuire & Dudley (2011) commented that they “envision a rapid evolutionary transition from unspecialized parachutist to specialized glider in their common ancestor. This conclusion is based on the absence of intermediate forms …”.

Upper Triassic Dinosaur Explosion (234-232 mya)

A recent study on Triassic dinosaur diversification by Bernardi et al. (2018) found an “explosive increase in dinosaurian abundance” and the lead author commented in a press release (University of Bristol 2018) that “it’s amazing how clear cut the change from ‘no dinosaurs’ to ‘all dinosaurs’ was.“ Of course, the authors did not consider design as valid explanation and instead pondered a remarkable naturalistic alternative for the explosive origin of dinosaurs: it rained a lot during this period, which therefore has been called the Carnian Pluvial Episode. Heavy rain hardly explains the origin of biological novelty. Apparently, the common trope that correlation does not mean causation does not apply to evolutionary biology, where explanatory adequacy of a supposed cause seems to be irrelevant as well as the distinction between necessary and sufficient causes.

Upper Cretaceous Mosasaur Radiation (89-66 mya)

Sudden discontinuous origins are not only found in the history of higher taxa but also within subordinate groups. A good example, among countless others, is the abrupt origin and diversification of mosasaurs in the last 25 million years of the Upper Cretaceous (Everhart 2005, Bechly 2023f), when they are said to have evolved from one meter long shore-dwelling lizards (Aigialosauridae) into fully marine snake-like giants of up to 17 meters length (Mosasauridae). They quickly diversified into numerous species in 42 genera around the world, filling different ecological niches. Putative ancestors of mosasauroids prior to the Late Cretaceous are not known. Moreover, even its proposed sister taxon Coniasaurus is of Late Cretaceous age and thus not a plausible ancestral precursor (Caldwell 2008). Any evolutionary relationship to recent monitor lizards and/or snakes is also contested and a matter of considerable debate among specialists (Caldwell 2008, Conrad 2008, Gauthier et al. 2012). The transition from monitor-lizard-like terrestrial ancestors to marine sea-serpent-like mega-predators did not just involve a simple reduction of limbs to flippers and allometric growth in size, but also the de novo origin of a tail fluke and parallel instead of split bronchi as an adaptation to marine life similar to modern whales (Lindgren et al. 2010).

The Abominable Mystery of the Origin of Flowering Plants (130-115 mya)

Charles Darwin called the abrupt origin of flowering plants during the Cretaceous period an “abominable mystery.” Indeed, nearly all early fossils of modern angiosperms first appeared abruptly in the Cretaceous and then rapidly diversify between 130-115 million years ago. Oskin (2015) commented that “Then, about 125 million years ago, angiosperms and their flowers sprang forth during the Cretaceous period, as fully formed as Aphrodite.” Darwin was deeply bothered by the pattern of their origin because “the seemingly sudden appearance of so many angiosperm species in the Upper Chalk conflicted strongly with his gradualist perspective on evolutionary change.” (Friedman 2009). Though paleontologists in China have recently described a few alleged angiosperms from the Mid-Jurassic period (such as Euanthus, Juraherba, and Yuhania), the classification of all these fossil plants as modern angiosperms has been rejected by Western experts (Sokoloff et al. 2019, Bateman 2020). There is also no evidence that these plants were ancestral to the later Cretaceous groups, and the paleontologists who have classified them have not even proposed them as such. Indeed, none of these mid-Jurassic period plants can be unambiguously attributed to any subgroup of modern angiosperms, all of which did first appear in the Early Cretaceous. Therefore, the enigmatic rise of angiosperms still represents an “inextricable knot” —an unresolved puzzle for those who assume the common ancestry of all forms of life (Augusto et al. 2014). Darwins abominable mystery is still alive and kicking (Bechly 2021f-i, 2022f, 2022h-i,m, 2023m), and this also strongly suggests that it not based on an artefact of an incomplete fossil record. Otherwise, the problem should have become at least a bit smaller in 160 years of paleobotanical research with an exponential increase of knowledge, instead of becoming even more acute (Buggs 2017a,b, 2021, 2023).

The Paleogene Butterfly Radiation (55-25 mya)

Large nocturnal and diurnal butterflies (“Macrolepidoptera”) are not known prior to the Paleogene period (Sohn et al. 2012, 2015), when modern families like Hesperiidae (Jong 2016), Pieridae, Papillionidae, and Nymphalidae appear abruptly in the fossil record of the Eocene / Oligocene of North America and Europe, without any precursors that would document a gradual development from moth-like Cretaceous forms (Bechly 2023e). This also contradicts evolutionist estimates, which placed their diversification in the Early Cretaceous (Wahlberg 2006, Heikkilä et al. 2012, Jong 2017). This phenomenon could rightfully be called a Tertiary Butterfly Explosion (Bechly 2023e) analogous to the Cambrian Explosion of animal phyla.

The Paleogene Big Bang of Modern Birds (65-55 mya)

The lineages of 95 percent of modern bird species also originated abruptly during the Paleocene epoch of the Paleogene period (previously known as Early Teriary) as did most of the mammalian orders (Feduccia 1995). Just like the placental mammalian radiation, the abrupt appearance of modern birds has been dated to a similarly narrow window of time from 65-55 million years ago. A whole-genome analysis by Jarvis et al. (2014) resolved the early branches of the tree of life of modern birds and has been announced in a press release by the American Museum of Natural History as “Mapping the “Big Bang” of Bird Evolution” (AMNH 2014). Another recent genomic analysis by Richard Prum presented a comprehensive time-calibrated phylogeny of modern birds (Prum et al. 2015). This work suggests that only four bird lineages (ancestral species of Ratites, Galloanseres, Strisores, and the common ancestor of all remaining Neoaves) predated and survived the mass extinction event marking the KP-boundary between the Cretaceous and the Tertiary (Paleogene). The most species-rich group Neoaves originated abruptly and diversified rapidly after this event (Brusatte et al. 2015; see Bechly 2024b). This avian radiation, has been appropriately called the “explosive evolution of avian orders,” (Poe & Chubb 2004), an “avian explosion” (Thomas 2015), and even a “Big bang for Tertiary birds” (Feduccia 2003). Moreover, no undisputed fossils of modern bird orders (crown-group Neoaves) have been found in sediments from the Cretaceous or older (Mayr 2014, 2016), rendering dubious molecular studies placing the origin and diversification of modern avian orders prior to the Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary. Even the very origin of the first birds in the Jurassic creates a famous temporal paradox (Feduccia 1995), because the oldest known birds like Archaeopteryx are millions of years older than the oldest fossil record of their assumed theropod dinosaur ancestors (Bechly 2022d, also see Bechly 2023o). This temporal paradox exists independently of any possible ambiguity of definition of birds vs dinosaurs as systematic groups.

The Paleogene Explosive Radiation of Placental Mammals (62-49 mya)

The first orders of placental mammals, and actually most orders of living mammals, appear abruptly in the fossil record during the Paleogene epoch between 62-49 million years ago, without known precursors (O’Leary et al. 2013), which is also subject of an ongoing Fossil Friday article series of mine on each of these mammal orders. Paleontologists called this series of events the “mammalian radiation” or an “explosive evolution in Tertiary mammals” (Feduccia 1995). According to Archibald (2012) “within approximately 15 million years of dinosaur extinction most of the 20 extant orders of placentals had appeared along with some 16 other orders that are now extinct. This was a truly explosive radiation and diversification.” Not only do many (probably about 15 of the extant) mammalian orders appear suddenly, but when they appear they are already separated into their distinctive forms. For example, the orders Carnivora (which include cats and dogs), Chiroptera (which include bats), and Perissodactyla (which include horses and rhinos) all first appear and are clearly differentiated from each other by their distinctive forms and features. The oldest fossil bats for instance, are unquestionably fully formed bats, capable of true flight and even echolocation. A layman could not distinguish their skeleton from that of a modern bat. Yet, we find nothing resembling a bat in the earlier Mesozoic fossil record. All alleged late Cretaceous crown-group eutherian mammals have not stood up to scrutiny (Archibald et al. 2001, Halliday et al. 2015). This is even more of a problem for Darwinists, because the latest and best combinations of phylogenetic tree reconstructions and molecular clock dating of the divergence times (e.g., Foley et al. 2016) strongly suggest a Cretaceous origin for all mammalian orders, of which not a single one is documented in the rich fossil mammalian record. This consistent mismatch is statistically significant and requires a better explanation.

The Big Bang of the Genus Homo (2 mya)

Many people think that our own species is connected to apes by a gradual transitional series of apeman fossils from East and South Africa. However, in reality there is a distinct anatomical gap between the ape-like australopithecines and the first representatives of our own human genus Homo. Hawks et al. (2000) suggested that the genus Homo originated abruptly 2 million years ago with sudden interrelated anatomical changes. They concluded that “In sum, the earliest Homo sapiens remains differ significantly from australopithecines in both size and anatomical details. Insofar as we can tell, the changes were sudden and not gradual.” This inspired a press release with the headline “New study suggests big bang theory of human evolution” (Swanbrow 2000). Hawks et al. also emphasized “that no gradual series of changes in earlier australopithecine populations clearly leads to the new species, and no australopithecine species is obviously transitional. This may seem unexpected because for 3 decades habiline species have been interpreted as being just such transitional taxa, linking Australopithecus through the habilines to later Homo species. But with a few exceptions, the known habiline specimens are now recognized to be less than 2 Myr old (Feibel et al. 1989) and therefore are too recent to be transitional forms leading to H. sapiens.”

The Upper Paleolithic Human Revolution (65-35 kya)

Abrupt origins are not just restricted to the anatomy of humans but also extend to human thinking, language, and culture. During the so-called Upper Paleolithic Human Revolution (Bar-Yosef 2002, 2007) we find a sudden increase in evidence for symbolic thinking such as cave paintings, ivory carvings, beads as jewellery and bone flutes. Therefore, this event has also been called the Creativity Explosion (Pfeiffer 1982, Mithen 1998, Price 2013) or even a “Big Bang of human creativity” (Gabora & DiPaola 2012). In spite of the discovery of human artefacts from the Middle Stone Age of South Africa and an attempt to “rethink” the human revolution (Mellars et al. 2007) the anthropologist Richard Klein found: “Recent interpretations of the African Middle Stone Age record are not conclusive; the original ‚human revolution‘ theory remains correct. Middle Stone Age humans evolving in Africa may appear anatomically modern, but did not become cognitively modern until the Later Stone Age/Upper Palaeolithic. Symbolic culture emerged some 50,000 years ago, caused by a genetic mutation that re-wired the brain.” (Knight 2010). There is even strong evidence for a “Sudden Appearance” model for the saltational origin of human cognition and language (Lanyon 2005, 2010). And of course this was later followed by the Neolithic agricultural revolution and the industrial revolution. Revolutions clearly are a hallmark of intelligent agency, not of unguided natural mechanisms. As we have seen above, the whole history of life is a history of revolutions that suggest design as best explanation.

Apart, from the ubiquitous abrupt origins in the major transitions of life, there is also a conspicuous lack of evidence for gradualism even on the low taxonomic level of species-to-species transitions. Actually, there were only three examples mentioned in the textbooks, which have all been refuted by modern research.

One example is from a group of marine shelled protists called foraminiferans, i.e. the alleged gradual transition of the species Globorotalia plesiotumida to the assumed descendant species G. tumida. A few years ago, a new study was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, which gives it away in the title: “Evidence for abrupt speciation in a classic case of gradual evolution” (Hull & Norris 2009). The study showed that the apparent gradual transition was an artefact from the failed identification of cryptic species.

Another famous example for gradual evolution, was a group of Miocene freshwater snails of the genus Gyraulus from the Steinheim basin in Germany. The shells of these snails from an ancient lake show very different shapes, and were used by the 19th century German paleontologist Franz Hilgendorf (1866) to create the very first phylogenetic tree with actual fossils and thereby confirm Darwin’s theory. However, there was also early criticism by sceptics, who doubted that the different shell types really represent different species rather than just different growth types (so-called ecophenotypes) within the same species. A few years ago this was tested by the careful study of living snails of the genus Gyraulus from lakes on the “roof of the world” in Tibet. This study by Clewing et al. (2015) corroborated the doubters and actually found all the different shell types within the same species and within the same lake, so that Hilgendorf’s phylogenetic tree turned out to be a mere fantasy.

The third and final example was the assumed transition between the East African ape-man species Australopithecus anamensis and A. afarensis. The latter is the species of the famous Lucy fossil. This transition has been called “one of the strongest cases for anagenesis in the fossil record” (anagenesis = gradual morphing of one species into another). This fancy story ended with the sensational discovery of the first skull of Australopithecus anamensis, which could be dated very precisely with radiometric methods. The result was published in Nature and proved that both species overlapped in their existence, which “contradicts the widely accepted hypothesis of anagenesis” (Haile-Selassie et al. 2019).

With all three textbook example refuted, Darwinists remain empty handed in their case for gradualism. This is by no means based on cherry-picked cases, and the rare examples for chronospecies or alleged direct ancestors do not help either (Bechly 2024a, 2024c). In the Darwin-year Hunt (2010) re-evaluated the fossil evidence for species level transformations in the light of 150 years of paleontological research since Darwin and summarized his findings as follows: “The meandering and fluctuating trajectories captured in the fossil record are not inconsistent with the centrality of natural selection as an evolutionary mechanism, but they probably would not have been predicted without the benefit of an empirical fossil record.” In other words: the fossil record does not conform with Darwinian expectations and shows no evidence for a directional evolution from ancestor to descendant species.

Last but not least, the abrupt appearances of biological novelty in the history of life create a fatal problem for the feasibility of the Darwinian mechanism as adequate explanation for the major transitions. This problem originates from the combination of two disciplines that are usually considered to provide good support for Darwinian evolution: one discipline is paleontology which establishes millions of years of deep time and a fossil record with transitional forms (e.g., Archaeopteryx, Australopithecus, and Tiktaalik) that are elegantly explained with common descent, thus establishes macroevolution. The other discipline is population genetics, which established the change of gene frequencies by random mutation and natural selection (microevolution), such as the origin of drug resistance among germs in a petri dish. The general belief is that such microevolution extrapolated over millions of years can explain macroevolution. However, if we really combine the results from both disciplines the synthesis refutes rather than supports Neo-Darwinism, i.e. an unguided process of natural selection acting on random genetic variation. While the fossil record provides well-established windows of time that were geologically available for major transitions to unfold, standard textbook population genetic provides a theoretical framework and formula toolkit to actually do the math. When such calculations and/or simulations are run with reasonable estimates of all parameters the unambiguous result is always that the geologically available windows of time are orders of magnitude too short to accommodate the required genetic changes to arise and spread in the ancestral populations. This is called the waiting times problem and it basically shows that Neo-Darwinism is mathematically not a feasible process (Hössjer et al. 2021), which is elaborated in a separate article (Bechly 2024d) including responses to potential objections (also see Bechly 2022e, 2022n).

The crucial problems of neo-Darwinism are meanwhile well known and acknowledged in mainstream science, which is why there is growing trend among theoretical biologists towards a so-called extended evolutionary synthesis. This was also called a Third Way of Evolution, alluding to two other way: Neo-Darwinism which is considered as a failure, and intelligent design theory, which is a route mainstream academia does not want to go. One of the main proponents of an extended synthesis is the Austrian scientist Prof. Gerd Müller, who held a very revealing keynote at the conference New Trends in Evolutionary Biology at the prestigious Royal Society in London in November 2016. In his keynote Professor Müller showed a slide that introduced five explanatory deficits of the Modern Synthesis, which is just a synonym for Neo-Darwinism (Müller 2016, Bechly et al. 2019). Among these five explanatory deficits, which Neo-Darwinism fails to explain, he listed phenotypic complexity, phenotypic novelty, and non-gradual forms of transition. If Neo-Darwinism cannot explain these crucial phenomena then it miserably fails as sufficient explanation for macroevolution in general. Alternative mechanisms suggested by the proponents of the extended evolutionary synthesis (e.g., niche construction, phenotypic plasticity, hybridogenesis, natural genetic engineering, evo-devo, epigenetics, GRNs, etc.) cannot overcome the explanatory deficits either, because they either do not address the crucial problem of the origin of novel complex specified information (CSI), or require Neo-Darwinian mechanisms to explain their own origin (e.g., evolvability). If Neo-Darwinism fails on mathematical and empirical grounds, then these alternative mechanisms could never have originated and are dead in the water.

Conclusion

The gradualistic core predictions of any unguided evolutionary mechanisms such as neo-Darwinism are strongly contradicted by the empirical evidence. The cumulative conflicting evidence from molecular biology, genetics, population genetics, and the discontinuous fossil record can no longer be explained away as anomalies or as artifacts such as under-sampling of an incomplete fossil record. The total evidence is better explained with pulses of infusion of new information from outside of the system (top-down), rather than with a purely mechanistic stepwise bottom-up process. The only known cause in the universe that is able to produce significant amounts of new complex specified information is the activity of an intelligent conscious agent, so that intelligent design theory qualifies as superior alternative to unguided Darwinian evolution in an inference to the best explanation (abductive reasoning) among competing hypotheses. This is not an argument from ignorance (i.e., God of the gaps) as is often incorrectly claimed by critics, but is based on empirical data and our positive knowledge about the regular causal structure of the universe and the type of causes that exclusively are known to produce certain effects.

Postscript

It is often said by ID critics that Darwinism or neo-Darwinism are obsolete terms that are only used by creationists but no longer used in real science. This is demonstrably nonsense and factually incorrect, as I have extensively documented elsewhere (Bechly 2022a). It also not true that evolutionary biology has moved beyond crude adaptationist Darwinism in the sense of natural selection acting on random mutations as an explanation for biological novelty. It is not for nothing that Richard Dawkins said that only Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist, and that atheist philosopher Daniel Dennett called Darwinism a universal acid. In more than two millennia of western philosophy and science, the most brilliant thinkers could not come up with any other plausible mechanism that could potentially explain how apparent design (specified complexity) could result from simple beginnings by a naturalistic bottom-up process. If Darwinism fails on empirical grounds then it is game over for a naturalistic and materialist explanation of apparent design in nature, which may explain the fierce opposition to any notion of intelligent design theory in the natural sciences. As evolutionary biologist Richard Lewontin famously said:

Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural. We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.

(Luskin 2021)

Literature