Does Chen's work pose a problem for ToE?

Well, no, it's not. The criticism of ID is that it never happens; this research seems to indicate one instance where it didn't happen.I don't see how the second validates the first. Maybe you can explain it to me?

The criticism of creationism is that natural selection and random mutation can't explain the diversity of life on Earth.The contention of this paper is natural selection and random mutation explain all of the diversity of life on Earth except for this one instance, apparently.I don't see how the second supports the first. Saying it fails once in a million examples, or once in a billion, doesn't support the contention that it fails in every case.

Why is that such a big deal? There's only 35, and their distinguishing characteristics don't seem to represent an enormous degree of evolutionary change. I mean, the things that seperate one phylum from another are things like whether or not you have a shell, or whether or not you have a "hollow nervous dorsal cord", or nematocysts, or a chitinous exoskeleton.And you think those morphological developments couldn't take place in a few million years? Creationists routinely posit far greater morphological change in far shorter periods of time (i.e. all bears and raccoons from one pair of bear-raccoon individuals.)

See my Message #3.

Substantiation?

What is this, a David Ives play? See message 6.

Fascinating, but that's not what I asked for. Did you forget what you were supposed to be supporting?

quote:

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The Cambrian explosion entailed as much variety of life as we see today.

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Or am I just wasting my time asking you to support your assertions?

Well, that's false. There are no mammals or reptiles in Cambrian fossils. There are no insects or flowering plants. I hardly think that these organisms would not be labeled "major life forms."There are representative fossils of all the major phyla, but if you were to compare these different organisms, you would not find them very different. It is only much later that the true diversity of life on Earth develops; the fossil record is one of increasing diversity over time, not vast diversity during the Cambrian era that has declined ever since.

Dinosaurs do not appear until the Triassic period, so you're quite wrong.None of the life-forms that you would probably recognize as "major" are present in Cambrian fossils. No reptiles, no mammals, no insects, no flowering plants, just basically worms of various body plans, and trilobites. And a few things that we're not even sure are organisms.

Diversity is a measure of the number of different species, not of phyla. For instance, in the Burgess Shale, one of the best records of soft-bodied organisms from the Cambrian, only 120 species are observed. The number of species currently described on Earth at this time is 1.75 million or so.We would not expect new phyla to develop regardless of how diversity has increased.

Can you be more specific about what you don't understand? I thought my message was pretty clear. That's my point exactly. Creationism refuses to believe that evolutionary processes can explain more than a fraction of the diversity of life on Earth.One example of one diversity event for which evolutionary processes may not suffice to explain doesn't substantiate that position. We've still got the vast majority of life on Earth being explained by evolutionary processes, which proves creationism wrong.