Dr. Stephen Meyer

There are a few pre-Cambrian animal forms, but they are much simpler.

They don't connect morphologically to the ones that arise abruptly.

And the attempts to explain the absence of the

of the animals as a result of incomplete sampling or incomplete preservation have failed for various reasons.

So the leading paleontologists saying, hey, we have to recognize this.

This is what Darwin called a saltation, an abrupt appearance of new form.

And in 2017, I wrote an article with the German paleontologist Gunther Beckley about not only the Cambrian, but we documented, I think it was 17 or 19 other major abrupt appearances of new forms of life throughout the fossil record.

It's not only the Cambrian.

It also happens at other levels, not only the phyla, but the classes, the orders of life.

The first mammals, the first turtles, the first sea reptiles.

Just go down the list of the major groups of organisms.

The first flowering plants.

In fact, the flowering plants arose so abruptly that Darwin called it an abominable mystery.

I think it's pretty widely recognized that we can produce modest adaptive changes through artificial selection within limits.

Fairly quickly, the genetic variability that's inherent in the genome is exhausted through those types of experiments.

You can make dogs only so big or only so small, and you can change their form very modestly, but you can't turn dogs into...

You know, that's a different kind of form.

Now, that has not by itself been perceived as a problem for sort of a neo-Darwinian view because artificial selection doesn't induce any mutations, right?

And the mutations are kind of the go-to source for innovation in the neo-Darwinian scheme of things.

But there are other kinds of problems that I think limit the creative power of the natural selection mutation mechanism.