Billions of Trilobites Having an Orgy -- And the Deeper Meaning

We have found billions (and billions) of trilobite fossils, but have not found a single trilobite ancestor.  We have found 17,000 trilobite species, and we keep finding more trilobite species all the time, but not a single trilobite ancestor species.  Why has the fossil record been so generous with trilobites, but not its ancestors?  Why does the fossil record show a clear pattern of trilobite success for 270 million years, but show us none of the purported ancestors that must have led to such success if Darwinian evolution is to explain their origin?  It strains credulity to believe that a long line of ancestors lived but did not leave behind a single fossil.

Orgies of sometimes billions of trilobites have been discovered, ones captured in a torrent of mud right after these extinct creatures ditched their hard shells to get up close and personal.

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Trilobites are extinct distant relatives of lobsters, spiders and insects that died off more than 250 million years ago, before the dinosaurs even came into existence. They prowled the seas for roughly 270 million years, longer than the Age of Dinosaurs, and new species of trilobites are unearthed every year, making them the single most diverse class of extinct life known.

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"We find trilobite beds that we can trace across distances of 80 miles (130 kilometers), all the effect of a single event," Brett said. "The numbers of individuals caught in those must easily be in the billions. These were probably extraordinarily rare events in terms of human scales, but on the grand scale of geological time, you can have a number of these extraordinarily bad days that record these amazing glimpses into what the lives of ancient organisms were like."

Richard Lewontin's "Billions and Billions of Demons"

I am happy to report that Richard Lewontin's review "Billions and Billions of Demons" is now available in full here. I have quoted from this review in several posts in the past:

One post contains the "divine foot in the door" quote that is in what I call "The Darwinian Fundamentalist Manifesto."

Another post discusses some great passages knocking Carl Sagan and Richard Dawkins and the science establishment: "Sagan's suggestion that only demonologists engage in 'special pleading, often to rescue a proposition in deep rhetorical trouble,' is certainly not one that accords with my reading of the scientific literature."

Another post discusses Lewontin's acknowledgement that the first "wedge strategy" concerning teaching evolution was formulated on the other side of the culture wars: "The elite culture was now extending its domination by attacking the control that families had maintained over the ideological formation of their children."

Another post discusses how Lewontin fits into a spectrum of worldviews and approaches to the scientific data.

Go ahead and read the whole thing.

Transcript of the Interview of Richard Dawkins By Ben Stein in the Film Expelled

This is a partial text of the interview of Richard Dawkins by Ben Stein in the film Expelled. This is the key section in which Richard Dawkins acknowledges that it is possible to find evidence of design in biology, and that it could have been seeded here by a "higher intelligence" from elsewhere in the universe.

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BEN STEIN: How did it get created?

DAWKINS: By a very slow process.

BEN STEIN: Well, how did it start?

DAWKINS: Nobody knows how it got started. We know the kind of event that it must have been. We know the sort of event that must have happened for the origin of life.

BEN STEIN: And what was that?

DAWKINS: It was the origin of the first self-replicating molecule.

BEN STEIN: Right, and how did that happen?

DAWKINS: I told you, we don’t know.

. . .

BEN STEIN: What do you think is the possibility that Intelligent Design might turn out to be the answer to some issues in genetics or in Darwinian evolution.

DAWKINS: Well, it could come about in the following way. It could be that at some earlier time, somewhere in the universe, a civilization evolved, probably by some kind of Darwinian means, probably to a very high level of technology, and designed a form of life that they seeded onto perhaps this planet. Um, now that is a possibility, and an intriguing possibility. And I suppose it’s possible that you might find evidence for that if you look at the details of biochemistry, molecular biology, you might find a signature of some sort of designer.

. . .

And that Designer could well be a higher intelligence from elsewhere in the universe. But that higher intelligence would itself have had to have come about by some explicable, or ultimately explicable process. It couldn't have just jumped into existence spontaneously. That's the point.


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The interview can be found on YouTube here.

George Marsden Identifies Darwinian Fundamentalism

In the context of the recent Bloggingheads controversy concerning Intelligent Design, George Marsden supported the premise of this blog:

Some religion history experts noted the ironic adaptation of Fundamentalist techniques on the opposite side of the evolution debate. "Recently 'the new atheists' have been characterized, even in some of the mainstream media, as like fundamentalists in their dogmatism," said George Marsden, a noted professor of American religious history at the University of Notre Dame. "Breaking relations with those who associate with your enemies sounds a lot like classic American fundamentalist 'second-degree separation.' "

I recommend Marsden's book, The Soul of the American University: From Protestant Establishment to Established Nonbelief, which gets into related topics.