Of Baramins and Baloney 23

March 19, 2009 by Dr. Mc.

Don

Let’s keep the goalposts where they were. Here is the original question

Re the Cambrian “explosion”, please tell me* one testable scientific hypothesis*, derived from whatever “design” paradigm you prefer, that would lead to **an outcome unique to your position**. By that I mean that the experiment, if it supports the hypothesis, would generate new observations that are explained by the framework of your paradigm, but cannot be explained within the framework of evolutionary theory.
This is based on your previous comment - “You know that every major body plan known today, plus many we don’t have today, are found in the Burgess shale and Chengjiang Deposits. We can’t just say the fossil record is not complete, because these fossils are in great detail, including soft body parts and organisms with no hard parts, and though there are many duplications across these deposits, there is no ancestral fossil record of transitional forms across most body plans. I am not here arguing that this is conclusive of instant creation, but I do suggest it is sufficient evidence to investigate further, which is all that science should require.”

Note that my question does not mention “organism complexity”, because I understand that to be an undefined concept. Does a new nylonase enzyme mean that a bacteria with that enzyme is now more “complex” than the progenitor strain, in your perspective? I merely asked you for a scientific *hypothesis *(testable) explaining the *observations *that you think are unresolved in evolutionary explanations of Cambrian body plans, *based* on your preferred “design theory”, that would lead to an outcome *unique *to that position (i.e., outside the predictions made by evolutionary theory). One scientific hypothesis based on your theory is a pretty meager requirement for a theory that you think should be considered alongside evolutionary theory in research and/or educational contexts.

In that regard it might be important to know that even though evolutionary theory fails to provide you with an incredibly detailed explanation for the proliferation of animal body plans in the time frame of interest, it actually does have a *mechanism* that can account for the observations in general. In fact, you can find many hypotheses which fit your requirements in many published papers in recent years. But you are going to have to learn a bit of genetics and developmental biology, so I won’t go into it here, since I don’t know your background in those critical areas. But here are some hypotheses, and some resources.

Mutations in regulatory sequences for homeotic genes (genes involved in development and determination of repeated body segments in many animals) can result in changes in body plan quite rapidly. One good example is pelvic fin development in stickleback fish (see Shapiro, et al. /Nature* */428 (2004), pp. 717-723.). Other examples can be found in chapter 8 (”The Making and Evolution of Complexity”) in Sean Carroll’s 2006 book (available in paperback), ./*The Making of the Fittest*/. If you read that you might have a better idea of how, exactly, the mechanisms uncovered by geneticists and developmental biologists in recent years have gotten us a lot closer to understanding HOW mutation and natural selection could explain the Cambrian “explosion” (which actually occurred over a period of at least 40 million years…)

hope this helps

Mark

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »