Cambrian Explosion

Did life begin slow and gradual like Charles Darwin predicted? What do fossils and the rock record say about this?

In November 1859, Charles Darwin published his famous book On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle of Life. In the book, Darwin viewed evolution by natural selection as a very slow, gradual mechanism of change within populations, and postulated that new species could be the product of this very same process, but over even longer periods of time.

But what is actually found in the rock record? Complex life is first observed in the layer known as the Cambrian. So, do we see slow, gradual evolution in the Cambrian layer? We don’t. We see the exact opposite. We see an explosion of diversity and life¹!

Geologists and palaeontologists call this phenomenon the Cambrian Explosion, during which almost every single major animal phylum appears “out of nowhere” on the bottom of the fossil record. There are no evolutionary ancestors, and the crazy thing is, no new basic body plans have appeared since the Cambrian Explosion.

Did Darwin know about the Cambrian Explosion? He actually did, and his comment on it was, “To the question why we do not find rich fossiliferous deposits belonging to these assumed earliest periods prior to the Cambrian system, I can give no satisfactory answer.”² So, this theory Darwin developed was not driven by scientific evidence in the fossil record.

Instead, the fossil record’s Cambrian Explosion fits perfectly with what is said in Genesis. God created all living things, not gradually over long periods, but all at once over six days. The scientific evidence falls in line with the Bible.

1. Tomkins, Jeffrey P. “The Fossils Still Say No: The Cambrian Explosion.”, The Institute for Creation Research, 30 Nov. 2020, https://www.icr.org/article/the-fossils-still-say-no-the-cambrian-explosion. Accessed Feb 22, 2022
2. Darwin, C. & Kebler L. (1859). The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. London: J. Murray, 1859.