Creationist Friendly Q&A

I disagree with you final assessment of the 'dirt' "answer".There are two things that need to be done with some of these kind of questions:
1) answer them
2) show how very silly they are in the context of knowing anything at all about what is being critisized.If someone is going to have any hope of getting out of the dark hole of ignornance that the literalists view is based on they need to be able to break free from sources which are lying to them. They need to see how very silly the things which they are being fed are.

The shortest period of time I have ever heard allocated to the time of the "explosion" is 5 million years.This site: The Cambrian Explosion gives 40 million years. I'm pretty sure that the longer times are now the consensus.What we get is a "non-explosion". We see many other periods with significant change in even the shortest time period. That is about the time we have been evolving separate our nearer surviving cousins. And that is under conditions with no wide open niches like there were for the first multicellular organisms.On the other side 40 million years is 2/3 of the time that the refilling of niches has been going on since the end of the cretaceous.This doesn't strike me as being all that anomolous at all. Especially when you examine what the end point (depending on where you define it) was. At the extreme it is a trilobite. Somewhere well through the time it is things like Pikaria. These maybe, with hindsight, represent different phyla but it takes an expert to say they are more than a bunch of funny worms.It reconciles with evolution because we understand that allowing organisms to have wide open niches allows for evolution to move dammed quickly.It is also not a problem as the time frames don't seem to be too terribly short in any case.I don't see what is particularly wrong with the "hard shell" theory in any case. There are traces of multi cellular life back to around 600 million years and one would not expect much to remain of worms after 600 million years would one? Hard parts had to come in at some point. Obviously (I hope it is), that would produce a quantum leap in preservation even if there was no real change in the diversity or number of living things around at the time.ABE
As with most of the really common questions it is important to, first, get the facts as straight as possible. Not to use old outdated information or only a few snippets from the real research.This message has been edited by NosyNed, 03-04-2005 19:41 AM