The Cambrian Explosion

Quotes from Strobel's "Case for a Creator":

"You have between twenty and thirty-five completely novel body plans that come online in the Cambrian. You have a huge jump in complexity, it's sudden, and you have no transitional intermediates."

"Here we have the geologically sudden infusion of a massive amount of new biological information needed to create these body plans, far beyond what any Darwinian mechanism can produce. " (Meyer)

Meyer had lots more to say about the Cambrian Explosion in his book "Darwin's Doubt" and in the DVD "Darwin's Dilemma".

Quote from Dawkins' "The Blind Watchmaker"

About the Cambrian explosion fossils "For example the Cambrian strata of rocks, vintage about 600 million years, are the oldest ones in which we find most of the major invertebrate groups. And we find many of them already in an advanced state of evolution, the very first time they appear. It is as though they were just planted there, without any evolutionary history." p229.

Ross quotes this on p59 of "Navigating Genesis" to illustrate the challenge of the Cambrian explosion of life. Other quotes from Ross:

Gregory Wray in American Zoologist 32 (Jan-Feb,1992), 131: "The Cambrian 'explosion' of body plans is perhaps the single most striking feature of the metazoan fossil record. The rapidity with which phyla and classes appeared during the early Paleozoic, coupled with much lower rates of appearance for higher taxa since, poses an outstanding problem for macroevolution."

Kevin Peterson, Michael Dietrich, and Mark McPeek in BioEssays 31 (July 2009), 737: "Thus, elucidating the materialistic basis of the Cambrian explosion has become more elusive, not less, the more we know about the event itself.."