Imagine it this way: the Cambrian Explosion began with a flash of light. In that space of two minutes on a 24-hour clock representing the evolutionary history of our planet, the seas lit up for the first time with bioluminescence. This new claim, made in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B and echoed uncritically throughout the mainstream media, more than doubles the age at which evolutionists thought this complex enzymatic reaction made its first appearance. Herein lies a tale of remarkable credulity among Darwinian materialists. Having conformed to an unwritten rule to see no intelligent design, hear no intelligent design, and speak no intelligent design, they have no recourse but to swallow the most improbable narratives on the flimsiest premises. 

Darkness Was on the Face of the Deep

In the Royal Society paper, Danielle M. DeLeo and four colleagues ran statistical analysis on representative species of Octocorallia, a class of cnidarians with some 3,500 species. Also known as soft corals, their taxon name (octo-coral) comes from their eightfold symmetry, contrasted with the sixfold symmetry in hard corals. Octocorallia are subdivided into up to six orders (depending on the taxonomy scheme), which include sea pens, sea fans, sea pansies, organ-pipe corals, and other types, some quite beautiful (example on YouTube). Growing from polyps into colonies, they extend their feathery tentacles into the water for filter feeding.

Many (but not all) living octocorals bioluminesce, not continuously, but with brief flashes of light when disturbed. Fossil octocorals are rare but known. Some have been found in the Burgess Shale, one of the great showcases of the Cambrian Explosion.

When did the first octocorals “innovate” bioluminescence? Before the new study, evolutionists had placed the origin of bioluminescence at 267 million years ago, in the Permian. Using a phylogenetic technique called ancestral state reconstruction, DeLeo et al. concluded that the earliest octocorals most likely possessed this complex trait. That pushes the origin of bioluminescence back another 273 million years, all the way into the Cambrian Explosion usually dated at 540 million years ago. If so, octocorals “invented” biological light before the comb jellies (ctenophores) did independently.

Mainstream science media jumped onto this conclusion without questioning it. The Smithsonian Institution wrote in bold type as indubitable fact, “Bioluminescence First Evolved in Animals at Least 540 Million Years Ago.” Live Science echoed the claim with its headline, “Glow-in-the-dark creatures appeared in Earth’s oceans 540 million years ago,” which, they add with astonishment, is “winding back the clock by a staggering 300 million years against earlier estimates” according to the new study. And Nature waxed eloquent, saying “First glowing animals lit up the oceans half a billion years ago: Family tree of ‘octocorals’ pushes origin of bioluminescence back to 540 million years ago, when the first animal species developed eyes.” Accordingly, evolutionists claim, when eyes popped into existence in the deep sea, they fortuitously had a light show to look at! Nature quotes the lead author putting this surprise into a Darwinian context:

“We had no idea it was going to be this old,” says Danielle DeLeo, an evolutionary marine biologist at Florida International University in Miami, who led the study, which was published on 24 April in Proceedings of the Royal Society B. “The fact that this trait has been retained for hundreds of millions of years really tells us that it is conferring some type of fitness advantage.” [Emphasis added.]

Most of the sources repeat a confession that the authors are not sure why bioluminescence evolved in the first place.

However, it’s not always clear why bioluminescence evolved. Take octocorals. These soft-bodied organisms are found in both shallow water and the deep ocean, and produce an enzyme called luciferase to break down a chemical to make light. But whether glowing octocorals use their light to attract zooplankton as prey or for some other purpose is unclear.

The Smithsonian quotes Andrea Quattrini, senior author of the study, admitting that “Nobody quite knows why it first evolved in animals,” hoping that pinpointing the arrival of the trait could shed light (pun intended) on “why the ability to produce light evolved in the first place.” Nature adds, 

Searching for answers, DeLeo and her colleagues analysed a large data set of genetic sequences and the sparse octocoral fossil record to reconstruct the animals’ evolutionary history. They then used a computer model to determine how likely it was that ancestral species were bioluminescent.

The model revealed that the common ancestor of all octocorals — which lived around 540 million years ago — was probably bioluminescent. The finding suggests that luciferase-based biofluorescence evolved early and was lost by non-bioluminescent descendants of ancient glowing octocorals.

Miracle Recap

Since design arguments are routinely excluded from the leading journals, this leaves Darwinians with a series of miracles to believe in.

• A complex enzymatic process for producing extremely efficient “cold” biological light appeared suddenly in the earliest octocorals during the Cambrian explosion.
• Eyes to see the light appeared around the same time.
• This ability has persisted to the present day but was lost in many octocoral species.
• Bioluminescence “independently evolved at least 94 times in nature” according to the Smithsonian.

The paper tops that number:

Bioluminescence is defined as the chemical reaction between a substrate (luciferin) and an enzyme (luciferase) resulting in light emission in a living organism. Luciferins and luciferases are identical and homologous among lineages that share a common evolutionary origin of bioluminescence, respectively, with exceptions in some marine organisms. A recent study suggested that the ability to bioluminesce has evolved more than 100 times independently (i.e. greater than 100 origins) across the tree of life.

Given one miraculous innovation, why not a hundred more?

How Did Scientific Explanation Get This Bad?

If this strikes you as bad science (if not bad logic), the reason is simple: it’s a consequence of methodological naturalism (MN). MN is the unwritten rule that requires all scientific explanations to appeal solely to natural causes. Any appeals to purposeful causes, such as intelligent design, are deemed “religious” by nature and are summarily censored by journal editors and peer reviewers. 

Swept clear of contenders, the field is left to scientific materialists. Like a football game played by one team, the remaining players are free to invent easier games, such as determining which materialist sub-team can come up with the best just-so story. They don’t have to look at the competent players on the sidelines. Like a uni-party government, they don’t have to debate substantive issues or listen to the political prisoners but can argue over which implementation of the party’s agenda best keeps them in power. Scientific life is so much easier without competition. But is it really science?

The common term “scientific materialism” is a misnomer because it’s not scientific. The essence of science is following the evidence where it leads. We should drop the adjective and call it what it is: materialism, a religious position masquerading as science. Let’s not fall into the trap of thinking that explanations for Cambrian animal explosions and purposeless emergence of bioluminescence by chance are scientific at all. They are uni-party discussions among totalitarians.

If design explanations were allowed back in, the scientific materialists would not have to accept them. But they would have to debate them. They would have to listen to the criticisms of the simplistic claims, like the unargued assertion that bioluminescence evolved a hundred times independently. This would be good for the materialist majority, because it would force them to be rigorous and not expect to receive automatic affirmations from other materialists. It would similarly force design theorists to be rigorous in their explanations. It would be good all around.

Debate over materialist explanations would also return science to its roots when natural philosophers commonly debated atheists. In the Bridgewater Treatises, for instance, eminent natural philosophers used the observations of nature to reason for artifice (design). They were not censored then. Sometime after the Darwinian revolution, under the influence of John Tyndall and Thomas Huxley, and especially after the media circus surrounding the Scopes Trial of 1925, materialists won the propaganda war and succeeded in ejecting design explanations as “unscientific.” Like totalitarian governments, once they have power, they don’t give it up easily. 

A Multi-Front Battle

This is the situation in which design advocates find themselves: sidelined by the arbitrary rule of methodological naturalism, forced to listen to uni-party propaganda telling the masses how exquisite features evolved. Various solutions have been proposed, and inroads are being made. Design explanations are getting a hearing, and some materialists are listening. They should be encouraged to keep thinking outside the materialist box. 

Let me add one possible strategy for approaching the public that was influential in breaking down the Berlin Wall: entertainment. Soviet leaders were shamed into looking like quaking has-beens when the popularity of Western freedoms looked “cool” to the masses. Totalitarians can threaten, but they hate being laughed at. When leading scientists claim that eyes and bioluminescence just popped into existence by chance, and this happened over a hundred times, I find ample fodder for entertainment, even comedy.